Ed's Turn
by Quagga
Summary: It is Ed's turn to fight in war this time. No longer a oneshot! ROYED, AU. FMA warfic!
1. Silence

**Disclaimer**: I don't own Fullmetal Alchemist.

**Note**: AU, no major spoilers. Roy and Ed are fighting in a war together, Ed is older, and Ed calls Roy "Colonel" even though he is a Brigadier General in this fic.

**Warning**: Violence. Strong language. Mild hints of Roy/Ed, so if that pairing isn't your thing, skip this one.

* * *

**Part One: **Silence

A cold torrent of rain laced out of the pitch black sky around midnight, effectively ruining what had been a peaceful couple of hours in the trenches. His messily constructed tent shielded him through the initial rain storm, until the east winds splattered him with a mix of mud and water. Spluttering awake, he lurched forward to his knees, coughing and spitting. A moment later, when he wiped mud off his face and glanced out from under the tent flap, half-torn open by the wind, he swore.

Further back in his tent, another form shifted, and a pair of bleary dark eyes opened, focusing on him through the darkness.

"Rain again." He said. "…Wind, too. I'd say God's trying to piss in our faces right now."

The other man looked at him blandly, motionlessly, before shaking his head. "There's no such thing as god."

"That was sarcasm," He replied, grouchily. "You know. I didn't really mean it?"

His companion – no, his fucking _boss_ – only looked at him in the darkness, before turning back to face the other direction. "Just go to sleep, Fullmetal."

"…When are you ever going to pull that stick out of your ass, Colonel?" Ed asked.

No response. Ed glared at him darkly, before plopping down on his side, back turned towards the other man in the tent. It was silent. Too silent, really – if the Colonel was asleep, Ed would have heard him breathing – long, heavy and slow, with the occasional tired snore. Sometimes, that was enough to lull Ed to sleep, too, but on most nights he lay awake and stared out along the trenches, listening to the other soldiers grumble and shuffle about in the mud. Colonel Bastard was never any help – always brushing him off and ignoring him, and if he was paying Ed any attention, it was only to offer up another idiotic short joke.

_You don't even need to duck, Fullmetal. The enemy can't see you over the top of the trenches, anyway._

_How come your combat boots have a two inch sole, Fullmetal?_

_Why aren't you wearing a regulation uniform, Fullmetal? All the sizes left too big for you? Should we get you an "extra-short"?_

To which Ed's response was always the same – _ha ha, funny, jackass, must think you're a _real _goddamn laugh a minute _– and he liked to see Mustang's face cloud in slight disappointment whenever he failed to go off on a hysterical rant. He turned and glared at Mustang for a moment, directing all his ire, frustration, and exhaustion in the other man's direction. No response. Mustang didn't even notice.

Ed pulled his knees to his chest and slung his arms around them, trying to ignore how fucking _miserable_ he felt. The rain shouldn't have been a surprise – every night for the last five weeks it had been pouring, as the seasons above them slowly transformed from a dry, miserably short summer to a fleeting, rainy autumn. He supposed he shouldn't have been complaining. Sleeping in the rain was better than forging through the bitterly cold snow and having to a wear a scarf around his automail at night to keep it from freezing. Some nights the temperature dropped so low he actually had to remove his automail and place it aside, before it drew all the heat away from his own body. The worst part about that, of course, was the reattachment. Somehow, he got the feeling that they had all just barely survived the last northern winter, and if this wasn't over by the next, than maybe they would die up here in the North, so many hundreds of miles away from anything they knew or cared about.

Ed did not want to die without seeing Alphonse again.

Next to him, the Colonel was still quiet and tense.

If Ed were in the mood for honesty, he might have admitted that at least short jokes were better than _nothing_ – nothing being blank eyes, a stony face, and a toneless, impassive voice. The colonel had to know that Ed preferred jokes and teasing and inane mocking over _nothing_, but sometimes he wondered if the man really _was_ getting senile with age.

Ed watched the rain for a while longer, before turning away and fumbling around in his pack until he came up with a flashlight. Sprawling on his belly, and trying to take up as little space as possible, he flipped on the flashlight and focused it on a scrap of parchment. Dipping his pen in a small vial of transmuted ink, he delicately penned six letters.

_Dear Al,_

Dear Al.

_It is cold and rainy. The colonel is being a bastard._ No, that wasn't good. _Dear Al. Last night the Drachmans took us by surprise with an ambush._ _ We just barely managed to fight them off. _That was bad, too.

Dear Al.

_Last night I killed a man. Like all the rest, he barely knew what hit him. His eyes glazed over, blood started pouring out of his mouth, and he collapsed. The sound he made when he hit the ground was kind of like a sack of rotting tomatoes being tossed up against a wall... Wanna know how I killed him? Alchemy. I fucking impaled him through the chest with my arm. They say I'm almost as efficient as The Colonel now. Isn't that nice? I can kill almost as many men in battle as the Colonel. When we're together, we're practically invincible. They always say that I'm the one who slices and dices, and he's the one who cooks them. Funny, isn't it? How we – mostly me – used to hate people for using Alchemy to kill?_

No.

Ed crumbled the parchment, angry if only because all his efforts were wasted once again – writing wasn't easy with his clumsy left hand, and it was damn near impossible with his right.

"That's a waste." The Colonel murmured, next to him.

"Go to hell. Who else is going to want it, anyway? The other soldiers have been wiping their asses with the spare paper we've got around the place."

"…Someone who might actually have the courage to write a letter to their families could use it, don't you think?"

Ed glared at Mustang in the darkness. "Fuck. You."

"You try writing a letter to Al every night. It never gets any further than a paragraph or two before you rip it up. It'd be better if soldiers _were_ wiping their asses with it."

Ed pointedly ignored Mustang – the man wasn't worth screaming at, especially this late in the night. Instead he unfurled the letter and read over it again, before painstakingly taking the efforts to blot out each word and start over again.

_Dear Al._

_I hope you and Winry have been well. The weather is nice here; it hasn't rained for over a week. My underwear are finally dry.. Enemy attacks have been few and far in between. The Colonel – that is, the Brigadier General - is in high spirits, and we are both in great shape. Tell Winry my automail is holding up well, and the cold doesn't bother it at all. According to the higher-ups, we may be able to come home by the end of autumn. Isn't that great? I'll see you soon._

_Ed._

Ed reread it a few times, over and over again, murmuring out loud. Next to him, Mustang shifted slightly.

"He'll see right through it."

"Shut up and go to sleep."

But Colonel Bastard was right – Al would see through every single lie he had written on paper, especially the last one – that they would be home by the end of autumn. That was the most egregious lie, because Ed _knew_ that this war was not going to end before winter, that it was not going to end _this year_, and that there was a goddamn good chance that Amestris was going to lose here, at the ends of the Earth.

_Dear Al,_ He mentally composed, _Take Winry and Aunt Pinako and get the hell out of the country. We are going to lose, and the Drachman will have no mercy._

But he wasn't going to write that, because he knew it would have the opposite effect – Al, who had raged and argued and complained with uncharacteristic furor when Ed had been called off to duty, would hop on the train and ride all the way to North City, and after a few days of travel, he'd be here languishing in the trenches with the rest.

More than anything, Ed wanted to keep Al _away_.

Next to him, Mustang shifted again, moving into another position. He was wet and uncomfortable, although Ed could tell he was making a considerable effort just to keep his pathetic package of supplies – which included gloves and matches – dry. Ed smirked at him through the darkness, an expression that, if seen in the mirror, might have taken him aback. It was that same infuriatingly moronic look the Colonel always directed towards him – and he knew it. Some dumb-assed coping mechanism was turning him into _the goddamn Colonel._

"I can see why you're all worked up again," Ed said, wickedly. "You're useless in the rain, aren't you?"

"If it continues to rain, we'll have to postpone the operation. The artillery unit can't get the tanks over the slopes if it's this slippery all day."

The answer was so dry and unaffected Ed almost felt tempted to punch Mustang, just to see some sign of life out of him. He didn't know why, but when irritable and cold the Colonel was even more infuriating than when he was being sarcastic. Whenever Mustang acted like _this_, when he gave dry, clipped-answers and ignored Ed's taunts, it was like talking to a shell – as if the Colonel wasn't even there.

Ed's efforts might have been more justly rewarded if he continued his conversation with a wall, he realized.

_Fuck Mustang._

He wasn't going to waste energy conversing with someone who had hit the off-switch on their own personality. Instead, he turned around to face the rain again, and read over his letter to al. Like always, he lost the nerve – his hands almost compulsively tore the paper to shreds, and he uncaringly let the scraps flutter away on the wind. Ed had told Al, when they'd last talked face to face, that no news was the best news – the postal service out on the fronts was sketchy anyway, and The State only made haste to deliver those particular letters, the ones that always left widows, stole mothers' children, and came with a folded uniform– and sometimes a watch – underneath.

This was different than the last, according to Mustang. In Ishbal, the State Alchemists marched through the battlefields unchallenged by the majority of the Ishballans, who had nothing to contend with the power of alchemy. The Drachmans, though, had their own limited understanding of alchemists, and threw all the strength they had at destroying them. Back in Central, the certifiers were overcompensating, giving someone the Silver Watch as long as they demonstrated that they knew the difference between their ass and the hole in the ground and could transmute _something_ out of _something_. Many of the alchemists they sent out didn't have any business in the battlefield at all.

Reginald Arthur Collins came to mind, a young alchemist – roughly eighteen – who went by the name of Reggie and specialized in transmuting semi-porous sculptures out of clay and sand.

_Sand castles_.

Ed had liked the dumb kid, despite it all. He was nice, amiable, and didn't have the usual knack for transcending god's domain that all other alchemists had – on the contrary he was a country-boy who claimed he was going to open up a shop to sell his clay sculptures. He'd shown Ed a few, and while Ed could have done the same with a blindfold on and his hands tied behind his back, the kid's overall congenial, friendly attitude and humility had kept Ed from pointing it out. As dumb as he was, the kid knew he was no Fullmetal Alchemist without having to be told.

(That wasn't just Ed's ego speaking, either. Whenever someone brought up Alchemical skill, the phrase, 'he's good, but he's not the Fullmetal Alchemist' was thrown around quite glibly. If tactical genius or soldiery was involved, Roy Mustang's name was thrown in there, too).

One day Reggie had been sent to the front-lines, under Brigadier General Mustang's command. That night, the Brigadier General had returned from the fronts carrying the body. According to him, the enemy had rained shells upon them, and when the kid had been told to transmute a stone wall, he hadn't moved the particles close enough together and the wall had crumbled. The enemy had shot him between the eyes.

They'd yelled at Mustang for going out of his way to retrieve the body. The Brigadier General – Ed's Colonel – had replied by saying that it was worth letting at least _one_ mother know her son's body hadn't been thrown in a _fucking_ pit and left to rot by the state. Ed had never seen Roy Mustang angrier in his life, but he thought he understood the feeling.

Sometimes Ed didn't know what was better - being one of those mindless drones who had to throw themselves in front of their commander and take the bullets for them, or being the commander that had to watch others die in their stead. Ed was both, and neither – still ranked a major, without a command of his own, but also continually in the presence of higher officers that he _supposedly_ had to die for. Lower officers had to die for him, too – it worked like that, because it was how to win a war, according to the Colonel. Mustang had told him that while sitting in the corner of their tent some nights ago, a blanket pulled around his shoulders, shivering almost uncontrollably.

On that day, someone else had died in his place.

Two AM rolled past. The rain did not let up, but Mustang kept on shifting and trying to find a comfortable position. Ed didn't know what the hell _his_ problem was – it wasn't like rain was getting in his wiring, or there was a slick, heat-absorbing metal object continually attached to him, or that a good portion of his weight _was_ metal. But then, he was probably just having trouble sleeping.

"Arthritis acting up again?" Ed asked, after a moment.

Didn't take the bait. Ed scowled and refocused on the rain.

After a moment, though, the Colonel shifted, and he saw the man looking towards him again. "…You're not going to sleep?"

Ed shrugged.

"Fine then." Mustang said, nonchalantly, before rolling on his side, away from Ed. "…It's your turn tonight."

Ed, surprised, said nothing. He shrugged and continued to watch the rain.

Sure enough, after the span of a few minutes, he could hear the Colonel's breathing – deeper and heavier than before, although he thought he heard something ragged every time he exhaled. Another infection? Diphtheria? Pneumonia? Diseases were ragging through the trenches: a man could have a sniffle one day, and the next day, he could be in his grave. That was another aspect of warfare that Ed was not going to put in his letter to Al, when he finally wrote it – that bacteria and viruses were killing soldiers faster than shells, gunfire, and alchemy.

More time passed – about a half-hour – before the Colonel shifted in discomfort, once more, and a soft moan escaped from his half-open mouth. Ed smiled wanly, and crawled on hands on knees next towards the other man. After a few moments, Mustang groaned again, and by the pain on his face, Ed could tell that his nightmares had won an easy victory tonight. It was expected.

Mustang had come back from the battlefield with blood all over his gloves and arms. Ed knew someone else had died for him, and most likely in his arms. Roy _hated_ it when people died for him, and whenever someone suggested that it was simply their job, he explained in the harshest tone possible that _one_ human life did not equal another, no matter how many times people needlessly threw their lives away.

But then, Ed sometimes thought that Mustang was wrong to even think of that in such a way – because War never followed the principles of equivalent exchange. Nonetheless, he slowly worked his arms around the Colonel's trembling form, and lingered in the darkness, murmuring.

"It's okay, you bastard. It's just a dream. It'll be okay. You'll wake up fine in the morning. This is going to end. It's _going_ to end."

In his nightmares, Mustang let out a soft, tortured cry. It sounded like 'Maes', but Ed wasn't sure.

On nights when it was Roy's turn, he did the same for Ed – and often came away with bruises up and down his side from flailing automail. Ed thought his nights were tame in comparison, because even in his sleep Mustang had some amount of composure – his horrified cries were muted (but no less painful) and he kept his shivering and thrashing to a minimum.

Still… Though Mustang probably wouldn't admit it, the only thing that really kept him from waking up screaming was Ed's presence. It was the same at night when Mustang folded his arms around the younger man.

They didn't need to keep watch for the enemy – there were always alert sentries at hand. Instead, they kept watch over one another, knowing that nightmares were a foe almost as terrifying as any enemy soldier could be.


	2. Heat

**Part Two: Heat  
**

"Over the top!"

The feeling of intense, cloying heat never left, even though – Ed had the distinct feeling –the air around him was frozen. In the soaking rain, he surged forth, scrambling over the top of the muddy ditch and running, back bent, teeth gritted, squinting through the rain. Behind him, a shell tore apart the ground, and the momentum from the explosion sent him and a dozen others flying. No matter – it happened all the time. Once he landed, awkwardly on his left foot and right hand, he clapped his hands together and slammed them to the earth.

He heard it, but didn't see it. Bloodcurdling screams, then nothing, as the ground rose in solid stone spikes and tore them apart. Ed's command continued on its charge across the country-side, feet kicking up mud, some with guns, some only using alchemy. He was towards the back where the survivors always were, and it did occur to him that the men in front were being gunned down at a steady rate.

This was reality. Not every one of them could be expected to survive such a desperate charge, but the sheer masses ensured that enough made it. They literally poured into the enemy trenches, bayonets out and weapons unfurled, and the Drachmans – unsuspecting, and yet surged on by the adrenaline similar to that of cornered, wild animals – fought viciously, taking down an entire line of Amestrian soldiers before they were overwhelmed. Ed clapped his hands and surged in with the rest, transmuting his automail right arm into a wicked blade.

Before this war, he'd never wiped human blood off his automail. Now he understood that killing Greed, and even being responsible for the deaths of others, was different than actually taking the life of another human. A homunculus was something born to die, an anomaly never intended for the world. Knowing others had died because of his actions was chilling, but nowhere near as chilling as actually thrusting his blade through the chest of a living, breathing human being.

The worst part was that it was easy. Frighteningly, mindnumblingly easy. He ducked a swiping bayonet and drew his blade diagonally across a man's torso. He fell and was trampled by the advancing soldiers. His booted foot swung upwards, catching a man in Drachman browns and grays in the chin, before the automail slid cleanly and evenly through his chest. Ed practically tossed him off the end of the blade, and even before then, he was dead.

Most of the people here were kids, actually.

Reggie, the idiot who had made sandcastles with his alchemy, was three months younger than Ed was.

_Ed_ was killing other boys his age.

And it was easy. Their bones couldn't withstand automail, and most of the Drachman alchemists were no match for him. He clapped his hands and stone spikes tore apart their array and their flesh before they even knew what was happening.

Sweat poured down Ed's back, clinging to his body with an unreal stickiness. He would have liked to believe that the warmth on his face was also sweat, but he knew it was blood – probably not even his own.

Ed continued to kill in the close quarters of the enemy trench, leaping over dead bodies and slashing, thrusting, impaling with his blade, panting raggedly and watching blood spray in fine plumes through the smoky air around them. One young soldier stumbled into his proximity, holding up his bayonet for defense. Ed saw his light brown hair and deep bronze eyes and thought Alphonse immediately, but it didn't stop his blade from striking his throat and sending him crumbling to the ground. Another soldier, desperate, screaming like an animal and almost frothing at the mouth out of terror, practically leapt right onto the end of Ed's blade. Ed tossed him aside.

_I could rip them apart with my bare hands if I wanted._

It was almost… exhilarating. The rush of power practically floored him with its intensity. It warmed his ice-cold insides, made him feel like his brain was on fire inside of his head. He only had to clap his hands or swing his arm and another one would die. There was one soldier with dark hair and furious dark eyes, who looked like Mustang might have, years ago. Ed imagined a mocking smirk on his face and those words he hated to hear –

_It's been four years, Fullmetal, and you still haven't found a single trace of the Philosopher's stone…_

He impaled the soldier through the stomach and practically tossed the body over his shoulder. His blade and entire arm were red, but he barely noticed – instead spotting a blonde soldier with sunken features that reminded him of Tucker, almost – maybe younger, but with the same unshaven appearance. Ed imagined Nina as he clapped his hands and slammed them to the ground. The soldier's high, keening scream of terror (as death came and claimed him) was both repulsive and satisfying.

A sharp burning pain across Ed's left shoulder caught his attention and he turned, seeing one of the Drachman Alchemists. A cocky grin plastered on his pale face, he stood with a lighter and an array drawn on the back of his hand; seconds later, another pitiful flame came in Ed's direction.

Mustang.

The Drachman Alchemist's control was terrible, and the flames died after only about five feet – the Drachman lacked the will to control oxygen the way the real Flame Alchemist did, but it was the same principle. It was the same mocking grin.

_You think you have me, fucker? You really do?_

Ed clapped his hands and the flame disintegrated. He knew the array, too – all he had to do was interrupt the air flow, and no more fire, it didn't even have a chance of reaching him. The alchemist's cocky expression crumbled as Ed rushed towards him, clenching his automail fist.

_You didn't even have time to finish me, Colonel…_

His automail fist struck the man's face squarely, and he could feel bone crack and crumble underneath the metal. Those snapping dark eyes clouded over, and the soldier crumbled instantly, his face split open by the sheer force of the blow. Ed turned, hearing a scream.

"You killed my brother you bastard!"

Hysterical. A young soldier with blonde hair and brilliant _gold_ eyes was rushing towards him, helmet hanging at an absurd angle off a bloodied scalp, his bayonet raised.

"Give him back! GIVE HIM BACK!" The soldier shrieked, and Ed waited, a strange half-scowl-half-smile on his face, ready to clap his hands.

Brother.

_I killed his brother._

Brother.

_I killed him._

Brother.

"Why are you doing this you fucking monster!" The soldier screamed, and Ed ducked his bayonet, feeling it just barely knick his cheek. The kid was fast, but to Ed, it looked like he was moving in slow-motion.

_'Brother…'_

That voice. Al's voice.

"You killed my little brother!" The kid screamed, and he swung the bayonet again. It ricocheted off Ed's right shoulder.

_'Brother… How could you? Don't you understand?'_ Al's voice again.

_Of course I understand. I killed my little brother, too, didn't I? I watched his body disappear into the gate. I understand. I do. I…_

The bayonet swung downwards, towards his head, and in a last, shuddering moment Ed realized that he'd been distracted by Al's voice in his head just long enough – the kid had him. Panicking, Ed clapped his hands together and thrust them forth, palms coming into contact with flesh –

- He knew the array, he knew the chemical compounds of a human body, he knew what he was doing –

- And he used the most perverse technique imaginable. Performing the entire transmutation might have backfired, but he stopped at the decomposition phase, and blasted the kid's torso apart from the inside. He literally exploded in a plume of blood – it was more powerful than Scar's technique had ever been.

He watched the body fall.

_Oh god. Oh God. Oh god._

He didn't even believe in God.

The youth hit the ground, and Ed stumbled back.

_Oh fuck… I killed him… I killed him…_

And he kept on seeing Al's face among the dead, among the faces of soldiers he knew he had killed, all in the last five minutes.

_'Brother.'_ Oh, yes, and he could hear Al's voice, too. Accusing. Al was _accusing_ him. '_How could you? How could you? What kind of monster are you? You're enjoying it aren't you? You're enjoying all this killing!_'

"I'm not… I'm not… I'm not…"

Ed's limbs were freezing, his skin turning ice-cold. He couldn't move his knees, even as he watched soldiers spar around him and knew it was only going to be a matter of time before someone got to him.

_'You enjoy it when they die… You don't even notice it… What happened to you, brother? I thought you said Alchemy wasn't for killing. I thought you said…'_

"I'm not… I'm not… Al… I don't…"

His eyes slid over all the dead soldiers and he saw their faces – there was Al, and there was another Al, and there was Mustang, and another Al, and another Mustang, and Winry and his mother and Nina and another Al and –

"No… No… NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"

Ed's scream tore his throat, and he fell to his knees, hands shaking the corpses, his entire body quivering as if there was an earthquake inside. "AL! ALPHONSE! WAKE UP! WAKE UP! AL, PLEASE!"

And there was the Colonel… Lying dead, his throat slit open, his blood on the end of Ed's automail…

"MUSTANG! ROY! Oh GOD, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I didn't mean… AL! COME BACK! ALLLLLLLLL!"

Someone grabbed him from behind and he struggled immediately, his senses coming back to him in an instant. He was doomed. He was going to die. The enemy had him during his moment of weakness, and it was going to be swift – Ed tried to struggle, punching, kicking, even biting, and tried to get away, to work out from their grasp. They knew well enough to try to pry his two hands apart before he clapped, but there was nothing in the world that could match the strength of automail. Their grip was powerful, but mere flesh gave way so easily… Ed clapped and drew forth his blade, and began slashing blindly… Again and again and again and again and he just wanted it all to stop…

He managed to pin them, knees on either side of narrow hips, and he rose his blade, screaming the entire time –

A huge fist struck him squarely in the face, so hard that his entire body arched backwards. He hit the ground a few feet away, jarring every bone in his body right down to the roots of his teeth. Dazed, he let his automail blade fall back into the mud and lingered, spread-eagled, trying to get his eyes to focus as he stared up at the black sky. Strange... It was so quiet. He hadn't even noticed that the battle was over, and had been since he'd killed the last Drachman Alchemist.

"…Thank you, Lieutenant Colonel." A hoarse voice said nearby. "…You can leave now."

"Are you sure, General?" A thick, morose voice asked, solemnly.

"He'll recognize me this time."

"…That was close, Mustang."

"…I'm aware of that, Armstrong. You are dismissed."

Ed heard heavy footsteps plodding away through the mud, and someone else moved to his side, crawling on hands and knees. He looked up, and when he realized it, even the last, faintest trickles of warmth left his body.

"Oh Fuck…" Ed whispered. He knew what that slash across Roy Mustang's throat, just millimeters from where it would have all ended, was from. He recognized the wounds he was capable of inflicting. "Oh fuck, oh fuck…"

Mustang's face was neither smirking nor mocking – instead, he didn't think he had ever seen the man more serious in his life. Or more dirty, for that matter – his face was stained with a mix of dirt and sweat, and there were ashes all over his clothing. He smelled like blood.

_Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit. He's going to fucking kill me. I almost killed him, and now he is going to fucking kill me--_

Ed scrambled away, trying to run. Mustang lunged before he could manage, grabbing his ankle and dragging him back.

"Fullmetal!"

Ed kicked his way lose, careful not to let his boot strike the other man in the face, and stumbled away, through the ditch. The battle must have been won. There were corpses everywhere… They'd gained enemy land. That was good.

That was very good. But Ed was running, panicking, hysterical.

_I can't face it I can't face it I can't face it I can't I can't I can't I can't do this… I want to go home, I want Al, I want to see my brother, he can make this better, he can, he can…_

"Ed! _Ed!_"

He tripped over one of the bodies and fell into the fetid mud. Immediately he lurched to his knees, grabbing at his clothing and his limbs with a wild urgency, trying to rid himself of that stench, of the blood, of the pungent scent of death all around him. He hadn't run very far – he watched Mustang stumble to his feet, some fifty yards away, and come limping in his direction. The man leaned on the muddy walls of the ditch, and had some trouble navigating – there were bodies all over. When he finally reached Ed, the younger man could see the tear in Mustang's upper pant leg, and the mess of bandages wrapped around his thigh.

"What happened?" Ed asked, in a cracking tone. Mustang slumped down besides him, drawing in his breath sharply as his wounded leg made contact with the ground.

"…Bayonet wound," He said. "I was careless."

"…You weren't down here in the trenches fighting too?" Ed asked, his eyes widening.

"…My unit was ambushed," He said. "Again. I was careless."

Ed continued to stare at him. Mustang's eyes were almost exceedingly bright in the darkness, even feverish.

"…Ed…"

He turned away. "Shut up, you bastard. I don't even want to…"

"Who did you see?"

"What are you talking about?" Ed snapped, looking down at his lap. He was a total mess – his own left pant leg was tattered below the knee, his automail visible. He looked like a freak, he realized – he only wore his tank top, and his automail arm was unveiled, too. Ed shivered.

A moment later, Mustang's overcoat dropped around him. For once, he gladly pulled the heavy material about his shoulders, even though he refused to look at the man.

"…You know exactly what I mean, Fullmetal." Mustang said, his voice still hoarse. "Who did you see? Your brother, right?"

"Fuck off," Ed replied, darkly.

Mustang reacted as if it were a term of endearment. He saw the man's hand move towards him, and he lightly touched Ed's cheek – his fingers were callused and wet, but very warm against the ice cold skin – and Ed only lingered in the touch for a moment before pointedly jerking away. Mustang didn't pursue it. Instead, he rose shakily to his feet.

"Come on. Let's go back."

Ed didn't move.

"…You're not planning on staying here, Fullmetal." Mustang said, in the most irritatingly bossy tone imaginable – as if he was the one doing the thinking for both of him, and whatever he said was undoubtedly the truth.

"What if I am?"

"You're not."

Mustang reached down and grabbed his left wrist, hauling him to his feet. Violently, Ed jerked out of the man's grasp, and moved towards where the sides of the trench were less steep. His feet navigated around the bodies. His stomach churned at the scent, and tied itself into knots – if he had eaten anything in the last several hours, he probably would have puked already. Perhaps – maybe it was just that he was becoming numb to it.

Once he was out of the ditch he started running, feet carrying him back towards the camp. Mustang couldn't run after him – couldn't jog, or walk at anything other than a shambling limp, either. But Ed glanced back once, to see the older man following him at a shambling limp, and even though Ed was not planning to let him catch up – he was too scared to face Roy Mustang now – something about it was reassuring.

_Colonel, you had better keep me sane, you bastard... I can't do it for myself..._ Ed's mind kept on repeating the same words, over, and over, and over.


	3. Respite

**Part Three: Respite  
**

The endless cacophony of exploding shells, firing rifles, barking dogs, men coughing, and rain pattering against the ground's surface kept the night from being silent. Ed listened and shuddered, huddling down in his blanket and pretending to hear nothing. If there were no sounds, there was no war. It was an alluring idea - no war, no blood staining his automail, and no death in the darkness around him.

He was surrounded by the base camp – a few miles behind the trenches, it was a haven compared to the horrors on the frontlines. Running water, electricity, and beds were still nearly thirty miles to the South, in the nearest small town – but there were warm meals here, and the chances of being shot at were slim. Ed knew he should have felt relief, but he couldn't – he didn't want to be here or anywhere on the battlefield.

He didn't want to face Roy Mustang. He had avoided the man successfully so far, but then, they did share a tent with one another. Sure enough, shortly after midnight Mustang arrived, unbuttoning his uniform jacket and tiredly throwing his bedroll down on the ground. Mustang, as an officer, had an extra blanket – it was one of the perks. But that didn't account for the other three blankets, which Mustang tossed down in earnest, before plopping to a sitting position and opening up his canteen. Ed watched from underneath his own blanket with narrowed eyes.

The Colonel would notice him soon, and then the accusation would come.

_You were being childish, Fullmetal. When are you ever going to grow up?_

_You were being selfish, too. How many soldiers do you think lost their lives today, Fullmetal?_

And then, there was the most vexing of all – _How dare you strike a superior officer, Fullmetal?_

Finally, Mustang looked in his direction, a blank expression on his face – and instead of anger, or discomfort, or even disapproval, he gave Ed a wan, tired, _terribly_ fond smile before turning back to study his canteen. Ed buried his face in the pillow.

_Not this. ANYTHING but this. He should be hitting me, or screaming at me, or scolding, or ignoring me... He can't be like this…_

Even worse than the Colonel's periods of apathy were the times when all he had to offer was that horrible, fond look, the one that made Ed feel like shit. The feeling was even more intense, now - there were bruises up and down Mustang's side from flailing automail, and a bandage around his throat where a transmuted blade had nearly ended his life. Ed lingered on the pillow, shoving his face into the airy cotton and wishing he could disappear into it. After a few moments passed, he forced himself to raise his head again.

Mustang took a few more drinks, before setting his canteen down – some of it sloshed over the side, and Ed was surprised that it was only water and not some kind of alcohol – and looked towards Ed. His eyes were still oddly bright in the gloom of the night.

"You should get something to eat, Fullmetal."

Ed glared.

Mustang paused, and grimaced slightly.

_Here it comes. He's going to scream at me._

Instead, the man reached forth, taking Ed's automail wrist and dragging the limb out from under the blankets. Ed nearly jerked away, before he saw what the Colonel was doing – pulling out a large handkerchief, he wetted it slightly with the water from his canteen and began wiping the blood off Ed's automail.

"What the fuck are you doing?"

"Isn't it obvious? If you're not even going to take care of yourself, I have to do it for you."

It was amazing, how terrible Roy Mustang always managed to make him feel. Ed buried his face in the pillow again, scowling and trying to ignore the other's presence, but it was impossible. After a while, Ed turned and watched miserably.

The Colonel's care and precision was almost amusing. He was extremely careful, as though the slightest mistake would break Ed's automail. Stupid bastard. Obviously he'd missed the fact that Ed threw it around all the time, slamming it into surfaces, using it as a shield, and killing with it, and there was probably nothing Roy Mustang could do outside of drawing an array on it and blasting it into pieces that would even put a dent in it. Mustang's eyes flashed over his face briefly.

"What?"

"…You don't need to be so careful. It's not going to fall apart."

"Doesn't it hurt when someone messes with the wiring?"

"No! What do you think? They're just wires. If you stick your hand in my socket, yeah, it might hurt, but I can't even feel what you're doing right now. Damn, get a clue." Ed muttered, grumpily. "Would it hurt if I started chewing on your shoe or something? It's the same principle. I just wear this damn thing. It's not a part of me."

That wasn't _entirely_ true, of course, and it was possible to hurt Ed by jamming fingers into the wrong place – the wiring was attached to his nerves, after all – but he didn't care. It was depressing to see Roy Mustang being so gentle, when he would have much rather had the man slap him across the face and leave him to stew in his own regrets for just a while longer. He was childish. He was being selfish. But the battle was over now, and no one was going to suffer for his weakness.

Instead, he watched Mustang's hair dangle into his eyes and the look of concentration on his face, staring at the man and suddenly entranced by how alive he was. Living, breathing, probably suffering here along with Ed even if he was an asshole, but alive… not like the thousands of corpses they had left strewn in pits and crumbled in trenches, with their empty glassy eyes and cold, clammy skin. Ed suddenly lurched forwards and grabbed the other man by the collar, yanking him down with a mad yearning that clouded his better judgment. Mustang relented – not that he really tried to resist – and Ed messily began tugging at the buttons on the man's white undershirt, sending three of them flying. One struck him in the eye, making Ed hiss and rear back momentarily, blinking painfully and rubbing at his eyelid.

Mustang was making a choking noise. At first Ed thought it was a cough, but on second glance, it was plain that the utter bastard was trying to force back a laugh. Ed scowled and swore, before wrenching open the shirt and pouncing. The fingers of his left hand splayed along pale, clean skin, feeling muscle and bone and scar all alike, and the warmth he sought. Roy Mustang was too warm, actually, maybe even a little feverish, but he was very alive.

It was nice to be touching something that wasn't dying. Ed buried his face in the crook of Mustang's shoulder and sprawled across him, breathing in his clean, warm scent and running his hands – both real and automail – down his Colonel's sides. It was frightening. Even if he couldn't feel the automail, he could sense that underneath him, Mustang was just as human as all those he had killed today. If he pressed too hard with his automail, he'd leave a nasty bruise, and it wouldn't be the first time, either. Strike him, and his ribs might crack. There was just a thin layer of flesh protecting Mustang's very human vulnerability, even though he usually acted like he was untouchable.

_This isn't normal,_ Ed thought, as he ran his hands across the other. _I should be thinking about what his skin feels like, or how warm he is… Instead…_

He was thinking about how easy it would be for his automail, or alchemy, or whatever weapon he chose, to break Mustang to pieces, too.

_Since when are humans so delicate? Do I even want my old limbs back, anyway? I'll end up just like them…_

There were a few scars here and there across Mustang's body, none as noticeable as automail, but they only helped drive home Ed's belief – Mustang was just like the rest… So pathetically human…

_If we fought, I could probably take him out, now. Even with his flames, I don't think he could defend himself. He might be more powerful than that stupid Drachman Alchemist, but the principle is the same…_

"…Ed..."

Ed winced, and swiftly intercepted the conversation, not wanting to hear what Roy Mustang had to say. He was using that tone again – a touch concerned and a touch exasperated, obviously about ready to offer Ed some hopelessly clichéd platitude that wouldn't solve anything. Even worse, he had chosen to call Ed by name – not title. He always used real names right before spouting hopeless bullshit, and for once, Ed just wanted the truth.

"…If I… really went insane… I mean, completely lost my mind…" Ed said, carefully, "do you think you'd be able to stop me?"

He felt Mustang tense underneath him, before relaxing slightly. The change was subtle, and Ed knew he wouldn't have noticed if he was across the room instead of sprawled on top of the older man.

"In Ishbal… I was the one who stopped Kimbley when he lost his mind…"

"This isn't Ishbal. And I'm better than Kimbley ever was."

Mustang let out a low sigh. "Do you think I could?"

"No. I don't think so. You'd die like the rest of them," Ed murmured, burying his head even further into Roy's shoulder and thinking how paradoxical it was, that he was pushing closer to a man as he imagined all the horrible ways that he could die.

"…Then I have a question for you," Mustang murmured, after a moment. "…If there was no other way, would you take a bullet and die for me?"

Ed tensed this time, and straightened up, glaring down at the man. Mustang only smiled thinly at him, looking serene and discomfited all at once, although there was something uncomfortably cold in his dark eyes. For a moment, they were silent, before Ed scowled nastily and turned away, not meeting the others eyes.

"That's a stupid question. I'm being serious."

"Well, then? What's your answer?"

"You didn't answer _mine,_ you bastard!"

"What do you want me to say?"

"Will you quit _dodging_ around it and be honest for once?" Ed snapped, wondering if he was asking the impossible. Mustang narrowed his eyes in the darkness, before shrugging slightly.

"What do you really want to know, Fullmetal?"

"I told you," Ed hissed, clenching his automail fist and waving it threateningly. "Are you gonna answer, or am I gonna have to beat it out of you?"

"If you're asking whether or not I could kill you… You can figure the answer out for yourself, can't you? If the conditions were right--" If it wasn't raining, Ed surmised, "I'd have a complete advantage. If not, it would be more difficult. But if you're asking whether or not I _would_ try to kill you if you went insane..."

Ed lowered his head. "That's not what I'm asking."

"It is. And I wouldn't."

Ed stared at him for a long time, before lowering his head and studying the pattern of the blankets underneath them, not wanting to look at Mustang and see that hopelessly concerned and fond look on the older man's face again. It was almost paternal.

"…Listen, Colonel. That's not reassuring. If you think that's going to make me feel better about it--"

"—I answered your question. Are you going to answer mine?"

Ed paused, and scowled. "No, you idiot! Your question isn't even _fair._ Just because you have _sex_ with me doesn't mean that I'm going to take a bullet and fucking die for you!" Seeing that the Colonel only smirked in response, Ed threw himself on his side, facing away from the other man. They were still touching – Mustang's side was against his back – but Ed could pretend, for the moment, that there was distance between them.

A few minutes went by silently. Outside, soldiers passed, some coughing, others muttering softly. Finally, Ed spoke again in the darkness.

"You're a sick, fucked up old bastard. You get a thrill out of messing with other people's minds, don't you?"

Mustang took the verbal abuse in stride, like he did everything, and said nothing.

A few more soldiers passed by before Ed spoke again. "…You're going to get tired of me and throw me out of your tent someday."

"Could be sooner than you think." The other man grunted.

"It might be good for me. Try to kick me out before I catch the sick bastard disease from you. Not that I haven't already," Ed said, rolling over to face the other man once again. "You'd better not ever… reproduce. If your kids end up like you we're all doomed."

"Just try to relax, Ed. It won't kill you."

"I am relaxed!" Ed snapped, slamming his fist against the ground, before plopping down roughly and leaning his cheek against Mustang's shoulder. Again, he was fascinated by the other man – the feeling of his bones through his skin, his muscles along his bones, his chest as it rose and fell, the warmth and the feel of his skin sliding under the fingers of Ed's left hand. Really, it might not have mattered whether or not he found Mustang attractive – he just wanted someone nearby – but he did. There was something exceedingly attractive about Mustang now, even though he was too worn and gaunt looking for his own good. Ed couldn't complain. He knew he looked the same – hadn't eaten more than once in the past two days, he wasn't sleeping, and the stress was getting to him. It was the same for both of them.

_Stress. It's just stress. Really… I'm not going insane… I'm just stressed out, and tired, and so is he…_

Ed was tired, more than anything. He thought vaguely of asking the colonel half-a-dozen things – for sex, another argument, some kind of insight into what the battle plans were, and maybe a hard shot of alcohol from that other canteen he carried tucked in his jacket – but he knew they were both too tired to do anything right now.

Instead, he lingered in the darkness, eyes drooping shut. The Colonel folded his arms around Ed, and the younger man scowled – _damn Colonel, doesn't keep his hands to himself_ – but as he turned he saw that bandage across the other's throat again. His scowl swiftly faded, and he relaxed against the older man, grumpily.

"…You're going to get kicked in the side with automail if we sleep this close to one another. I flail around a lot."

"I'm used to it by now."

"…You'd better be."

"There are worse things..."

"Like what?"

Mustang didn't respond, but Ed felt the man's arms tighten around him and knew an answer wasn't necessary.

He could hear rifle fire in the distance. Ed could relax even with the noise, but it bothered him that Mustang, so close to him in the darkness, kept on tensing uncomfortably whenever the rifles stopped and started up again. But it didn't really matter – exhaustion would overcome the older man eventually. Instead of worrying about it, Ed lingered and listened to Mustang's heartbeat, and his steady, slightly ragged breathing – all that mattered was that he was still alive and still Mustang, one of the few humans Ed had encountered today that wasn't going to crumble and die under his touch...

...For now.

Ed often found that he could never make guarantees for the future.


	4. Savior

**warnings:** attempted rape in this part.

**Part Four: Savior**

Ed was floating somewhere in endless cold darkness before something warm and wet on his face drew him back.

He opened his eyes. The sky above was a bizarre conflagration of black smoke and orange sunset that lit the edges of the horizon as if it was on fire. It filled his entire field of vision, and he wondered where he was until it occurred to him that he was sprawled on his back on the hard ground, arms and legs spread out and face covered in warmth. He reached up with his right hand first, the movement jerky and unsteady. Hard metal struck his face, and only when his vision cleared did he realize that he had smacked himself right across the cheek.

_...Great. I can't even control my own automail._

There was either something wrong with the wiring or something wrong with his brain. He guessed the latter – a mass of flesh was more susceptible to weakness than a hard lump of metal, and this wasn't the first time he had misjudged his own movements and done more damage than he had intended. Thinking of an endless inventory of broken coffee cups, broken pens, broken bedposts, and broken bones that had came as a result of out-of-control metal limbs, he uncomfortably rolled into a sitting position and surveyed his surroundings for the first time.

A moment later, a soft, gurgling chuckle escaped from his sore, battered throat, and he spoke his thoughts aloud, knowing no one except the pack rats would hear him.

"…I must've missed the memo, huh?" He choked out. "…Everyone else died without me… I always get left out of these things…" He buried his face in his arm momentarily, still giggling with an almost psychotic abandon. The situation shouldn't have been funny. He was sitting in a battlefield, near to a crater where a shell had struck the ground and torn it open, and around him were corpses in blue and gray uniforms. Screaming or crying would have been appropriate.

Edward Elric didn't care about propriety. He was laughing.

A second later nausea welled up and he keeled over, clamping his automail hand over his mouth and groaning thickly. The situation grew even more sickly and humorous – everyone else around him had died in a shell blast, but he was suffering from no worse than an upset stomach.

Trying to gather his wits about him he rolled to his feet, stumbling slightly when he put his weight on his right leg and catching himself with his left before he toppled. The world tilted crazily before him and he nearly fell right back to the hard ground.

Ed's head ached with brutal intensity, and when he reached up with his automail and prodded more warmth began trickling down his forehead. He knew he was probably making it worse by jamming his metal fingers against it, but he didn't want to move his other arm. His wrist hurt too badly, and the rest of it felt strangely numb. He didn't feel like using his natural limbs, anyway – they both felt horrible. They weren't exactly trustworthy, either – bruising and breaking all the time… Bleeding…

_If I rip them off and replace them with metal, at least they'd stop hurting._ Ed thought, as he stood and poked stupidly at his head injury. Another strained chuckle escaped from his mouth, as he tried to figure out what had happened. He could guess that he was very near to the epicenter of a large shell blast, and had been lying on the battlefield, unconscious, for a long time.

It must have been an Amestris victory, but no land had been gained. They had retreated into the distance, where he could see the lights of the camp. The trenches were behind him – the Drachmans had broken through the Amestrian front line today – but something told him that the Drachmans probably weren't far away, either. He didn't want to get captured. Tales of Drachman brutality to Amestrian POWs spread rampantly throughout the camp, nauseating stories about decapitation, twisted experiments, and disgusting torture techniques.

Ed let out another choking laugh, grabbing at his throat almost compulsively (another wound there, too). What was humorous about those stories was the assumption that the Amestrians were any better. Looking about the battlefield and seeing the dead strewn in piles without regard to proper burial or any honor whatsoever, Ed doubted it, and thought of Mustang again.

Most of their dead were tossed in pits or simply left to the rats. Ed had long ago made a purposeful effort not to think about it, but Roy Mustang always protested, and always risked getting his own body thrown in a pit by going out of his way to retrieve dead bodies in order to give them a proper burial. Ed always watched, wanting to dissuade the older man and yet not really _caring_ enough.

Mustang was delusional and it was best to just let him be.

Ed stumbled forwards a few paces, before _missing_ the ground and somehow ending up flat on his face again. Not sure what else to do, he let out another short, gasping laugh and wiped dirt off his face with his right sleeve, which was mostly in ribbons. The situation grew funnier when he noticed more blood trickling down his cheek and looked at his automail arm, stupidly.

He had forgotten to transmute the blade over his hand back into a regular forearm. It was a shock he hadn't cut his own head off by now. Ed chuckled at his own expense, rolling half on his side and crookedly slapping his hands together. The transmutation took what seemed like an absolutely unproportional amount of energy, and he had the feeling that he had already messed up the subtle mix of metals in his automail. It was only a matter of time before he broke it again.

He could almost hear Winry yelling at him.

_...But I don't see why she gets so mad. My automail holds up a lot better than the rest of me…_

Ed worked himself back up to hands and knees, breathing heavily. He was hot and cold at once – heat blossomed out from his head as it throbbed with a fiery ache, but there was a coldness sinking in the pit of his stomach. He wondered why his own comrades had just left him here, lying in the battlefield – and he was a valuable alchemist, no less? Had they lost their minds? Or had they just assumed that the shell blast had blown him to pieces?

Ed vaguely remembered feeling the heat of the explosion and performing some kind of protective transmutation – a stone wall, maybe – just before it had vaporized him. The others around him hadn't been so lucky, and those far enough away to survive had probably assumed he was dead without even checking.

_Dumb bastards._

Ed stumbled back to his feet, shaking with more nervous laughter. He tried to hold it back, because the more he laughed, the more he realized how absolutely horrified he was. He didn't even have a good reason, either – Ed knew he wasn't in danger, and he knew the battle was over.

He knew he wasn't dying. His head injury ached, but the cut was superficial, and his limbs were sore but not broken. He had a mass of cuts and bruises, and was nauseated, but none of it was bad enough to kill someone who had blown off limbs and survived automail surgery. Maybe he was just being pathetic. He needed to get a grip on himself. He needed his senses in working order. He needed the tinny, metallic ringing in his ears to stop. He needed a drink. He needed dry underwear.

He needed Al.

The orange in the sky was fading, slowly disappearing into black indistinguishable from the smoke in the air. Ed pressed his automail hand to his face again, this time without poking a new hole in his skin, and lingered for a moment. His brief attempt at regaining composure succeeded, and he began walking back towards the camp. He must have looked like a drunk– limping heavily because his port was burning and his flesh leg was covered in bruises and cuts, and swaying whenever the aching in his head intensified.

_It's probably a concussion._

Ed swore. His voice came out cracked and gravelly.

His feet sent little puffs of dust up in the cracked ground, and he took in the sights as if he was one some kind of vacation tour. On his right were burnt corpses – Mustang's handiwork, and he saw they were all in Drachman grays. On his left was a pile of rats, and they were having a feast.

Ed covered his mouth again, bending over. He couldn't remember eating anything in the last forty-eight hours, and didn't throw up, although the dry heaves were almost as bad. He straightened up after a few minutes and decided to ignore his surroundings and preserve his sanity, if only just for a few more minutes. Every burnt corpse he saw made him want to strangle Mustang out of misdirected anger and beat the man for even _thinking_ of killing someone in such a gruesome way…

…Although the blood on his automail reminded him that impaling someone through the chest with automail wasn't much better – cleaner and quicker, but in the heat of the battle his aim was bad and it didn't always kill them right away.

…He really needed Al.

Ed smiled again in the darkness. It almost felt sinful to think of Al while he was walking through a deserted wasteland full of men that he and other alchemists had killed. He was unable to separate the war from thoughts of his beautiful, innocent little brother in his newly restored body. Thinking of Al always led to mental pictures of Al crumbled out in the battlefield, a bullet hole through his forehead, bayonet clutched in hands, and a helmet lopsidedly thrown over his bronze hair…

…No. Al might have been kind and gentle, but somehow Ed knew he would have been handling this better than he was. Ed wanted to be able to control his own mind. Once he pushed aside the images of Al dead among the others, and thrown in a muddy pit, he thought of Al impaled on the end of his automail, a look of horror on his pale features and his eyes wide and wounded.

_Brother… how could you?_

But Al wouldn't say that. Al wouldn't even blame him – he hadn't before, and why would he now? Al was the same as Mustang, who hadn't even been fazed by Ed's attempt at murdering him. The thought was haunting – what did he have to do to earn their hatred, anyway? He sacrificed his little brother's body to the gate, nearly sliced Mustang's throat open, and they kept on offering him sympathy and even love instead of hate or anger.

Armstrong, the only other witness to his breakdown, treated him like glass now and kept on giving him looks of pity and understanding. Mustang seemed even more _fond_ of him than before. Al's letters, when they came – always in lumps of ten or more saved up from a month of no mail to the fronts – were full of concern and warmth. They were deluded, blind people…

_They're idiots, especially Mustang. He'll break before I do. I'll probably outlast them all…_

No. Al wasn't an idiot – he was Ed's wonderful little brother, who idolized and adored him because they were family, and because they had always been together. Mustang didn't have an excuse for being such a blind goddamned idiot.

A low noise interrupted Ed's reverie and he turned, looking for the source. A soldier was crumbled brokenly on the ground, shuddering and letting out choking, animal like moans of pain. As Ed neared, he saw that they were wearing the Drachman grays. Ed frowned and came to a stop over the man, assessing his injuries – he was a mass of burns, not from the explosion – this was too measured and precise.

Mustang always burned individual soldiers in the same manner – sending a bolt of fire into their chest and then filling the air around them with oxygen to create an explosion. Most of the time they blasted to pieces, but sometimes – when he was distracted, or moving swiftly – they ended up with third degrees burns starting somewhere around their torso and spreading outwards.

This man was clearly branded by Mustang. Ed knelt, suddenly, not knowing what he was doing.

_This is an enemy soldier… We kill enemy soldiers, and don't feel any mercy for them._

Still, Ed was not thinking clearly.

"…Hey. Hey! Hold still, okay? I might be able to do something for you."

The man was thrashing and moaning beneath him, and Ed began fumbling with the pack he carried at his side, wondering if any of his first aid supplies were left – or even remotely usable. There were a few band aids, and Ed almost laughed at the audacity of the morons back in Central, who supplied their soldiers with first aid packs that contained little band-aids. Didn't they realize that there were men being blasted to pieces? Band aids were not going to cure missing limbs.

…But then, the tiniest of cuts in the wrong place and at the wrong time usually meant death by infection, even if it came on a little more slowly and a lot more subtly than death by missing limbs or shell blasts.

The man continued to noisily die underneath him as Ed gave up on fumbling through his pack and turned back to him, almost panicking.

"I'll go get help, okay? Just hold on!" Ed rose to his feet. The man let out another scream, and another… And another, full of agony and terror, before thrashing again as a strange look passed over his face.

Ed recognized that look, of course. Glassy eyes… Limp… A few last rattling breaths, before the life went out of him entirely… The Drachman soldier died and Ed stared down at him, eyes widening as he realized how stupid he was being.

_Why the fuck didn't I just put him out of his misery? I can't save anyone. Even if I had, he'd just become a prisoner and some Amestrian bastard would probably shoot him._

Ed turned away abruptly, now shivering, trying to push the image from his mind. It was selfish, but watching them die in agony was easier than giving them a swift route to their inevitable death. But Ed really didn't just _watch_ others die – he was actually stupid and childish enough to harbor the delusion of being able to save them.

Mustang sometimes yelled at him for stopping in the middle of battle and trying to save the hopelessly injured, and Ed always snapped back, pointing out Mustang's habit of going out of _his_ way to save the ones that were already dead.

He saw the first living human beings after five minutes of stumbling towards camp – two Amestrian soldiers, and a third figure not in uniform. The closer he moved, the clearer it became – the two Amestrians were standing and poking at something with their bayonet while jeering. As Ed neared he heard soft, muffled screams and laughter.

_What now?_

Ed didn't recognize the men in uniform, but that meant nothing – he hardly paid attention to the rapidly changing cast of cannon fodder foot-soldiers around him. They were taunting a young girl in tattered clothes, who sobbed and pleaded with them even as they stabbed at her with the bayonet and grabbed at the bottom of her dress, trying to push it upwards in a teasing manner. Ed watched for a moment.

Her pleas were in the language of the people of Drachma – mostly unintelligible to Ed, but after fighting against Drachmans and killing them, he recognized words like "please" and "stop" and "don't hurt me" amongst her hysterical sobbing. Just a few days back they had flattened one of the Drachman border towns, and he imagined she was one of the civilians the Amestrian Army had imprisoned. Ed supposed most of them had been executed by now – there just weren't enough supplies to keep them alive – but there was a use for all the young women they had found.

The soldiers were enjoying their moment of power. The girl was helpless.

_We really aren't any better than the Drachmans, I guess. They torture their prisoners, and we do things like this._

_...We're animals._

But what was there to stop them? Out here on the battlefield, they did not live with the law in mind. If murder was allowed, why not other crimes? No one was around to enforce it. The higher officers didn't care enough to prevent things like this from happening. Ed knew he shouldn't have cared, either – he should have already turned away.

Too late. As one of the men pounced, pushing the girl's dress up even as she struggled, Ed found that his feet were carrying him even before his mind consciously complied with what his body was doing. Neither of the men noticed, although Ed was almost certain that he was screaming some obscenity in their direction as he approached.

His metal fist collided squarely with the first man's jaw, and the resounding crack was one of the most pleasing sounds Ed had ever heard. The sight of him doing an almost graceful arc through the air before hitting the ground hard was pleasing, too, but Ed only marveled at it for a split second before turning to the second man. Still straddling the young woman, his pants were unbuttoned and his expression was utterly clueless as he stared up at Ed.

"GET THE FUCK OFF HER!" Ed screamed and kicked all at once, and the man was on his back in a moment. He made some pathetic attempt to fight back, thrusting forth his bayonet – but Ed caught the blade in his metal fist and crushed it simply by tightening his fingers. The look of shock on the man's face was greatly amusing, and Ed tossed away the bayonet and wrenched the soldier up by the hair.

"…You idiot, you're on our side!" The Soldier pointed out, needlessly, right before Ed silenced him with a punch in the jaw, sending him crumbling to the ground again. Once the man was down, Ed began to kick him in the back and sides.

"How do you _like_ that, you fucking _ANIMAL!_ What in the _hell_ is wrong with you? _WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU?_" Ed roared, and his voice cracked, as he listened to the soldier's pleas and realizing that they were filling him with a kind of savage glee. When he finally finished, his boot was red, and the soldier was sobbing and twitching. The other man was still unconscious, although it was plain at just a glance that his jaw was broken.

Ed turned to the young woman.

"Are you okay?" He asked her. She only stared, and didn't answer. Thinking perhaps she had gone into shock, Ed stepped a bit closer.

"…You'll be safe now. These bastards won't bother you any-" As he spoke, he held his hand forward.

Her high shriek of terror cut him off like a smack to his face. Ed froze, watching as she scrambled to her feet and turned, running as if demons were on her tail. Ed watched, surprised – she sounded even more terrified now than she had before.

_Must have been shock,_ Ed concluded. _I'm not really that frightening… But I guess one Amestrian soldier looks the same as the rest. She has a right to be scared._

And, maybe, reaching towards a girl who had nearly been raped and beaten with an automail hand covered in blood was not the most reassuring sight, either.

A second later he realized that she was running right towards the sentries, and they always on high alert after battles –

--A gunshot rang out. He could just barely see her tattered clothes doing a silly pirouette in the wind before she hit the ground, hard, several hundred yards away in the gloom of the night. It was amazing that the sentries hadn't come in the first place, but then he realized that they were probably well aware that two higher officers had brought out a young Drachman girl beyond the camp with plans of raping her without consequence. Ed wondered if Mustang knew that the men under his command were doing this. He doubted it.

Nonetheless, he came to a conclusion while trying to keep from screaming… or maybe just laughing again at the sickening irony of it all.

_I can't save anything._

He amended the thought after a glance at the crumbled Amestrian soldiers.

_I'm far better at killing things than I am at saving them._

Ed turned slightly and began moving towards the far end of camp, avoiding the sentries. He felt like he was wading through chest deep water – cold chills kept on converging and rising inside of him, too, and they worsened as the night around him deepened.

His journey was from the edge of camp – he avoided the sentries – and towards their tent. No one saw him, and if they did, they didn't recognize him. Ed was glad – he figured he was officially dead or MIA after the battle, and that was why he had been left in a pile of charred corpses. It was sort of insulting.

_That stupid bastard Mustang didn't even risk his ass and come looking for me. Maybe he finally went out and grew himself a brain._

Ed pushed open the tent flap and stumbled inside, grimacing immediately. Mustang was sprawled across his bedroll and unconscious, although the insides of the tent looked like a train wreck. The Colonel's uniform jacket was thrown down near the entrance. His gloves were inside out and thrown in a corner. There was a canteen, too, open and with half its contents spilled out along the dusty ground – Ed plopped down, ran a finger through the substance, and gave it a sniff.

Alcohol.

"…You're pathetic, Colonel," Ed growled, pulling up his knees and slinging his arms around them. For a while, he was silent.

Mustang was clutching something in his arms while he slept, and it took a moment for Ed to realize that it was his own red jacket. He scowled in exasperation and crawled towards the man on hands and knees, at first wanting to rip the jacket out of Mustang's grasp. Even if it was showing its age and too tight around his shoulders, it was warm. The bastard couldn't possibly be cold -- he had Ed's blankets and his own pulled to his chest. But really? Ed didn't want the jacket, and Mustang seemed fairly adamant about holding it while he slept, anyay.

Closer now, he could feel heat emanating from the older man even without touching him. There were heavy lines under his eyes, almost like bruises, and his eyelids looked slightly puffy. Mustang needed a haircut, too.

Seeing the man reminded Ed of all those burnt corpses in the battlefield, and for another oddly intense moment he hated Mustang again.

Ed knew directing his hatred towards the Colonel was unfair – he had committed the same crimes as the bastard – but it was easier to chose a target that wasn't himself. Self-hatred was just too taxing, and it was oddly cathartic to blame the Colonel for everything.

While Mustang was lying in here, either sleeping or unconscious, his soldiers were out raping Drachman prisoners. Ed clenched his fist tightly, so tight that the joints creaked – but what stopped him from simply striking the man was another glance at Mustang's face… Puffy eyes, slightly reddened eyelids, and _oh fuck_, he was clutching Ed's jacket to him with a desperation that was almost pathetic.

_He thinks I died in the shell blast. Stupid, stupid,_ stupid _bastard._

Ed finally plopped down next to the Colonel, and the man shifted in the dark. A moment later his eyes opened – they were bright and feverish in the gloom – and he stared at Ed. It was too dark to see his expression.

"…Fullmetal?" Mustang asked, stupidly. "… I thought you were--"

"—You were wrong." Ed cut him off, turning to face the other direction. He didn't want to look at the man.

"But--"

"No. While you were sitting in here drinking, I was lying out on there in a pile of corpses, you bastard. Someone should have noticed that I was alive before leaving me there…"

Mustang was quiet for a while longer. When he drew in his breath to speak, Ed cut him off.

"…Why don't you yell at me like you usually do? I didn't duck in time. I nearly ended up getting vaporized. I shouldn't have been in the range of the shells, anyway, but I was trying to get the other soldiers out of there. Aren't you mad?"

"…No."

"…What the hell is wrong with you, anyway?" Ed asked calmly, turning back over. Mustang was staring at him with a clueless expression, and it only infuriated Ed more. "You still want to fuck me, and I almost killed you the other day? How fucked up is that, Colonel? Are you just stupid, or crazier than I am?"

Mustang didn't even have anything clever to say. Instead, he sidled closer and put his arms around Ed.

_...You've got to be kidding me._

Ed almost laughed. The Colonel was insane. That was the only way to explain it. He wasn't sure if he minded it or not, but he realized he'd been relying on Roy Mustang to be the sane one for far too long. Ed thought maybe too many blows to the head from flailing automail at night had addled Mustang's brain. He hardly seemed to be fazed by much of anything, these days.

"…Colonel, are you totally--"

"I'll yell at you in the morning, Fullmetal," Mustang replied, finally. "…Be quiet."

_Oh_ fuck, _was his voice just shaking?_

Ed didn't answer his own question, but he lingered miserably until Mustang's breathing deepened again and the older man fell back to sleep. With a scowl, Ed disentangled himself from the bastard's arms and sat up, fumbling around with Mustang's pack until he found the bandages and the canteen with water. He drank half greedily, and used the rest to clean dried blood away from the wound on his head, ignoring the lancing bolts of pain each time his clumsy automail fingers prodded the wound in the wrong way.

When he finished, he tossed himself back down, trying to move into a comfortable position up against the older man. He threw his limbs out and his automail arm accidentally smacked Mustang in the jaw – not hard enough to break the skin, but probably enough to leave a mark – and he froze, expecting the man to wake up and scowl at him like usual.

No. Ed was the one who scowled. _Bastard's so lazy he could sleep through anything. Don't know why I worry._

But that wasn't true at all. On the nights when Ed slept, Mustang woke up constantly, sometimes drawing Ed out of his own sleep when he violently shifted or jerked into a sitting position. The slightest changes in the night – usually explosions in the far-off distance or gun-fire – woke the man up easily.

Not tonight.

_The bastard is so tired. So am I, but I don't think I can sleep._

A moment later a ridiculous thought came to him – had the Colonel died suddenly? Was that why getting accidentally smacked with a flailing automail limb hadn't woken him up? But Ed smiled in the dark, for once able to allay his own fears with logic. The Colonel still breathed raggedly, and he was still coughing.

_...He's not dead. Dead men don't breathe, or cough, or wheeze, like he's doing…_

But a second later, he came to an even more logical conclusion.

_Yes they do. They cough and wheeze for a few days, and then they die. You can't save them. You can't stop it. That's how it is out here._

Ed couldn't save anyone, but not even the camp doctors could save a soldier when their health decided to turn on them.

_I can't deal with this, you bastard… I can't. Not now…_

He closed his eyes tightly and tried to banish the immediate feeling of terror that overcame him… And yet he had the feeling that the terror had been there all along, ever since he had woken up after the battle, and until now, he had just done a far better job of suppressing it.

Now he was choking back noises that were somewhere between hysterical laughs and horrified sobs.


	5. Faceless

**Part Five: Faceless**

Ed remembered the intense heat of the battle some weeks ago (or had it been longer?) when he had nearly killed his commanding officer. He remembered the terrible adrenaline welling up inside of him and blinding him to the reality of what he was doing. He remembered being scared…

It would have been a lie to say that he wasn't scared now. The situation was completely reversed – the Drachmans were charging across the muddy, deadened expanse of no man's land, bayonets and rifles held aloft and faces grim. Line after line of them crumpled to the ground under Amestrian shells and rifle fire, but they kept on coming, a gray mass of enemies determined to kill and kill and _kill_ until the battle was over. Almost without thinking Ed was clapping and slamming his hands to the ground, feeling a ripple of energy flow through him and emerge in tremendous stone spikes among the charging enemy masses. Their screams meant nothing to him – they weren't close enough for him to see – he was killing faceless, nameless enemy soldiers and there wasn't enough time to think of what he was really doing.

It was almost...fun, like solving a challenging alchemical formula or drawing a difficult array.

Mustang crouched in the trench behind him, soaked through by the torrential rain. Ed could tell that there was something _savage_ in the other man, too, something that wanted to stand alongside Ed and use his alchemy to kill the advancing enemy. Mustang fell into a kind of trance whenever he killed with his flames – snapping his fingers continually, sometimes so fast that both his hands blurred, and creating pile after pile of burning corpses. When Ed watched him, there was nothing on his face. No fear… No regret… No pain… Just a kind of odd intensity in his hollowed out eyes that eventually faded into nothingness as the battle waned. Today, though…

Ed was going to do the killing for both of them.

Mustang was worthless. With the rain soaking through his gloves and making a flame impossible, Ed was Amestris' most powerful human weapon. He wondered if he'd ever be able to explain _this_ to Al – that sometimes, killing wasn't painful, it wasn't hard, it wasn't even enough to make him feel regret – sometimes, it was enough to send ribbons of savage glee through his mind.

He slammed his palms together again, and pressed them into the mud. The Drachmans were fifty yards away, but a rift opened in the muddy ground and swallowed another line of them. They had to know this was suicidal – charging across no-man's land was like lining up targets. Killing them had _never_ been easier.

"Why do they keep on coming, Colonel?" Ed shouted, almost jovially, and almost hysterically, over the noise of rifle fire and explosions around them. "Why don't they just give it up!"

Mustang gave him a strange look. "…Because we're losing. There's too many of them to stop."

"Huh?"

There were thousands and thousands of Drachmans, and they kept on coming in a massive, unstoppable swarm of gray uniforms and bayonets. Even Ed's alchemy failed to slow them down, and he was killing them at the rate of dozens-per-minute. Now he was beginning to realize – the tables had turned, hadn't they? Amestris didn't have the advantage in this battle – there were too many Drachmans, too few Amestrians…

…Ed felt his throat tighten and a strange fluttering in his stomach. The Drachmans were now less than twenty yards away, and horror swept through the Amestrian trenches like a disease, infecting everyone with a raw hysteria that even Ed felt. Still, he remained grimly calm. Mustang crouched behind him. On his right, a dead Alchemist with a bullet in his brain was slumped over and half-buried in the muddy ground. On his left, another silently prayed to some God, muttering feverishly and tearing through the pages of a holy book. Ed clapped his hands, transmuted his automail into a blade, and waited. Automail and Alchemy would not fail him. He was going to hold back the flow of Drachmans – they couldn't stand up to _him._

_I understand, now. I think I might outlast everyone here, whether they're Drachman or Amestrian._

The Drachmans swarmed the Amestrian trenches and Ed charged, impaling the first man through the chest with his blade and tossing him aside, scornfully. They surrounded him on all sides, but he clapped his hands with ridiculous ease and impaled them all on stone spikes. This battle was no different than all the ones that had come before. Killing was still easy. The adrenaline still flowed through him, intensifying every time another Drachman soldier crumpled to the ground beneath him. The only difference was that the small kernel of horror, which had exploded into a mind-consuming panic and had nearly resulted in Roy Mustang's death, was gone. In its place was nothing but a savage, primordial _glee._

_I feel nothing. I don't even care any more. I can watch them die, and I don't feel anything._

He didn't think he'd ever be able to explain this to Al. But then, Ed also doubted that he'd even get the chance.

He impaled another soldier, tossed him aside, slashed another across the throat, whirled around and pressed his hands to the ground, and –

-something small and green clattered to the ground next to him, and he blinked stupidly, reaching for it with his right hand, his brain too caught up in the maddening haze of battle to properly rationalize what was happening. It was a good thing that Mustang was doing the thinking for both of them – the man came from seemingly nowhere, grabbing Ed by the collar and yanking him back viciously. Too late – the grenade exploded and turned Ed's entire world white for a few horrifying seconds. He felt debris - scraps of metal - strike him in the face and sides, leaving a littering of small cuts across his body, but none of them were deep enough to cause anything more than fleeting discomfort.

Mustang continued to drag him backwards, yelling something about retreating back to the base camp. Ed jerked loose and shoved at the man, viciously.

"Get the fuck off me! I'm trying to--"

Ed didn't know what he was trying to do, actually. When he raised his left hand to clap it occurred to him that the right was missing. A second later, he realized that those spare scraps of metal had been his _automail._ The right arm had been blown out of its socket, and was in a million pieces all over the bottom of the trench. There wasn't any time to gather the pieces up again, and even if he could…

_Even if I could, what would I do with them?_

Ed let out a strange, choking noise, horrified. His _automail_ had failed him. And without his automail, he couldn't do alchemy. He was now just another faceless, worthless soldier in the Amestrian Army, surrounded by swarms of Drachmans. He managed to dodge a few bayonets that were thrust in his direction, but it was only a matter of time… He realized with a kind of sick humor how _deluded_ he had been in thinking that he was any more invincible than the rest of them. He was now completely helpless. He didn't have a bayonet. There wasn't enough time to draw arrays. Ed didn't even think he remembered the proper way to fire a gun. There was nothing… Absolutely _nothing…_

Mustang grabbed him again and started dragging him backwards, over the rim of the trench - the older man was probably the only reason he wasn't dead right now. They were making some kind of retreat – scrambling out of the ditch and moving away from the massacre.

_We're losing the battle. I hardly lasted five minutes._

Ed stumbled along side Mustang, hardly moving his legs. He was even more worthless than the Colonel – Mustang could command and organize men into fighting units, and had managed to surround them with other Amestrian foot soldiers even in their undignified retreat. Ed, on the other hand, moved along stupidly, as shells began to fall and all around him the fucking _apocalypse_ seemed to be overwhelming the Amestrian troops. The Drachmans were _slaughtering_ them, and retreat across open territory was the only way that any of them were going to escape with their lives.

"Fullmetal!" Mustang shouted in his ear rather suddenly. "_Get moving!_ I'm not going to drag you the entire way!"

Ed realized he was slowing down the retreat and holding back the others, and finally managed to galvanize his legs into action. His automail left leg felt heavy, like a leaden weight, pulling down the rest of his body with it. He groaned and stumbled, limping heavily as he ran. Mustang turned to him, his face either angry or terrified – Ed really couldn't tell the difference. There was a strange whistling in his ear, something coming towards them…

_Oh fuck…I know what it is…_

The shell landed and exploded somewhere in front of them. Mustang tackled Ed into the ground, although it might have been the momentum - and both of them went rolling in the mud, pelted by shrapnel and burned by the immense heat. When they stopped rolling, Ed realized he couldn't move even if he tried – he wasn't badly injured, but he was shivering, and his eyes were wide, staring up into the smoky sky. A strange kind of paralysis had come over him.

_I'm helpless, I don't have my arm or my alchemy and I can't do anything… I can't even move._

Shells continued to explode all around them. He was only paralyzed by fear for a second – another shell exploded, dangerously near to him, and Ed jerked to his feet. Mustang… The Colonel hadn't done the same. He was still lying on the ground.

"Get _up,_ you idiot!"

Mustang struggled for a few moments, before _somehow_ managing to get back on his feet. Ed remembered how horribly sick Mustang was, how feverish his skin felt to the touch, and how, this morning, after spending all night shivering in the trenches and coughing, he'd been so weak that he could barely stand. He was sick. He had been for a long time, even before Ed had almost killed him. There'd been so many nights spent lying close to one another in the tent, when Ed had been lulled to sleep by listening to Mustang's ragged breathing. Even on nights when Ed stayed awake the entire time and watched the other man have oddly composed nightmares, Mustang had been coughing and wheezing.

_Why didn't the bastard take sick leave? He's been here on the fronts longer than I have… They'd give it to him._ Seconds later, Ed realized that the answer was very obvious.

_If I didn't have him around, I would have gone totally fucking nuts a long time ago. He knew that. He probably stayed here because of me._

No… _Fuck_ no. Ed didn't want the Colonel's death on his conscience. Mustang's left leg had been pelted with shrapnel, and he winced every time he put weight on the limb. Ed reached for him, planning on offering Mustang some kind of support, but a second later someone from the other direction sprinted up to them and shoved Ed aside.

"Go, Edward. Get out of here. I'll take care of the Colonel."

He recognized the voice and whirled around. "Lieutenant--"

Hawkeye gave him a stern glare and shoved him aside, moving to Mustang and yanking his arm over her shoulders. Ed watched numbly, only vaguely aware of all the shells exploding in their vicinity. He hadn't seen Lieutenant Hawkeye for a while, but she seemed as unchanged as ever – stern, calm, and probably the only person capable of keeping their wits about them during situations like _these._ But…

…It was strange. Was this guilt that he felt? Mustang had protected him ever since he'd came to the battle fronts, and Ed had never done anything in return except endanger the older man with his own psychosis. It was stupidity on the Colonel's behalf, and selfishness on his. He had missed dozens of opportunities to return the favor – Mustang had been sick for the better part of a month, and Ed had spent the time denying it, ignoring it, and pretending that it was nothing to be concerned with.

_I really can't save anyone. But I could have. The bastard might have done something about it, if I wouldn't have been so_ fucking _helpless… If he hadn't felt the need to protect me like I'm a child..._

Ed stumbled after Hawkeye and Mustang, glad that the Lieutenant was here. Alchemist or not, she probably knew more about equivalent exchange than he did – Mustang protected her, too, and she protected him in return. Ed didn't have to worry about the Colonel –

--Another shell exploded just yards away. It wasn't close enough to throw Ed off his feet, but a panicking young soldier, fleeing the explosion, slammed into him and knocked him down.

"You fucking idiot!"

The soldier only screamed, and they both went rolling. Seconds later, Ed scrambled to his feet, clutching the area around his empty automail socket (the nerves were aching in protest) and looking around wildly. He couldn't see the Lieutenant or the Colonel anywhere through the smoke and haze. Crying out for them would have been worthless – rifle fire and shells continued to bombard the frigid afternoon so hard that Ed's ears were ringing. Instead he looked around wildly… Nothing. They were gone, they'd probably continued moving towards camp. Ed had fallen behind.

He was surrounded by dozens of other panicking Amestrian soldiers – no familiar faces. Fear spurred Ed onwards, and he began running towards camp, ignoring the whistling of shells and continual rifle fire and instead trying to keep his wits about him while everything else went to hell. He had to get back to camp and meet up with the others. He shouldn't have been worried… There was nothing to worry about… No reason to be scared, he was going to make it back…

But he was horrified. Ed knew terror – he'd seen his brother's body disappear inside of the gate (and known it was his fault), he'd been cornered by a serial killer and had faced down chimeras, suits of armor armed with swords, and homunculi. He didn't think anything was as terrifying as losing Al, but the sheer _insanity_ of the battle and the terror incited in him by his helplessness was close. He couldn't do a thing to stop all the carnage around him… He had once been able to create carnage himself, but with an empty socket of an arm he was nothing more than a pathetic _child_ who didn't belong here.

…Ed blindly sprinted towards camp, forgetting that nothing was ever easy for him.

"Ow, shit!"

The afternoon was dark with rain and smoke, and Ed had forgotten about the mile of barbed wire that surrounded the outer perimeter of the base camp. It was a stupid mistake – one moment he was moving, and the next moment he tripped and fell right into the wires. He hit the ground hard, dozens and dozens of stinging barbs embedded into his skin… He tried to disentangle himself, but the wires only tightened around him. Ed swore and cursed, struggling mightily and only managing to make an even bigger mess out of the situation. They were scratching his face and his left arm and his right leg and his torso and all over –

_Damn it. Damn it, damn it, damn it, DAMN IT!_

Ed finally managed to kick loose and crawl a few feet away, flopping down into the mud. Every little cut started to sting, and Ed let out another semi-hysterical stream of curses and profanities, rage and frustration overcoming him. He crawled forwards a few more paces and slumped down.

"Shit… _Damn it…_"

He had mostly left the battlefield behind, but the ground still shook with explosions. The adrenaline of battlefield had faded, too – he felt like leaden weights weighed down his entire body, and could hardly move. He was missing an arm, his leg felt like it weighed a ton, and he was covered in cuts, bruises, and injuries from shrapnel and barbed wire. He was separated from Mustang – his commanding officer. There were no other sane Amestrians around – soldiers ran past him, but they were panicking.

This was hell and the end of the world, all at once, and Ed suddenly wanted Al more than ever.

"…Al." Ed muttered, refusing to raise his head. "Al…Where the hell are you? Al… I need some help… I think I need you… Al… Al… AL!"

There was no response. In the logical remnants of his mind, Ed knew that was because Al was hundreds of miles away. But in every other sense, he was filled with a faceless horror that seemed to be suppressing whatever logic he had left. He wanted Al.

"…Al… _please_, Al…"

But what would _Al_ do, Ed wondered? Would he even be able to help? Or would he be just as lost as Ed was? The idea of his little brother being here to save him was ridiculous… Al would have been in danger constantly, and Ed knew he couldn't protect anyone. Al might have tried to protect him, but look what had nearly happened to _Mustang..._

_I'm too dangerous to protect… Even Al couldn't..._

Al couldn't save him from this, but just _seeing_ Al might have made things a little better.

"…Al…Al! Al! _AL!_" Ed's control slipped. He cried out his brother's name hysterically, his voice cracking and his throat constricting in terror. Even as he panicked he could feel the vibrations in the ground, and he knew that the shelling was getting closer to where he was. Pretty soon a shell was going to land and explode nearby, and snuff out what little life there was left in him – only if he was lucky. Al wasn't coming, and nor was any other kind of salvation. If there was a God, he or she was determined to torture Ed as much as possible.

_Oh fuck… AL!_

His cries did attract someone's attention. Three or four soldiers surrounded him, and a rubber boot nudged him in the side, flipping him over. Ed went along with it, still clutching his automail socket and ignoring them. They were probably the Amestrian medics, and he hoped they passed him by – his injuries weren't bad enough for them to waste time and treat, anyway. A moment later, it occurred to him that they were chattering in some other language, and Ed realized far too late that he had made another monumental mistake.

_If I had kept running, I would already be back in camp now. I don't know if it's safer there, but now..._

Ed opened his eyes and looked up, seeing four leering Drachman soldiers above him. Their faces were hard, and there was recognition in their eyes. He knew what they were seeing – an alchemist, a demon, it was as plain as the silver chain dangling from his pocket. Even without the silver chain they would have recognized him, anyway. The only Amestrian Soldier who had killed more Drachmans than Ed was Mustang, but Ed had the feeling that they hated _him_ even more than they did the Colonel. Mustang was just another soldier, but Ed was the arrogant demon in the red jacket that killed and killed and killed and sometimes even _laughed_ while he was doing it. Ed opened his mouth – maybe to plead, and maybe to threaten them – but was silenced by the booted foot that struck him squarely in the face.

The next boot struck his side, and the next, his chest. He curled up into a tiny ball, his remaining arm going over his head, and they pummeled him relentlessly.

_They're going to torture me before they kill me. To make sure I pay for what I've done._

Ed didn't bother trying to fight. If there were only one of them, he might have been able to take them on even without his arm, but with four kicking and striking him from all sides, there was no time to draw an array or stumble to his feet. And he really didn't care, either – Ed let out a strained, gurgling moan and realized that he had long ago given up hope of ever seeing Al again.

The Drachmans started to stomp, and Ed gritted his teeth. Even if it meant nothing, he wasn't going to give them the satisfaction of crying out – but that was foolish. He couldn't hold it in for long. Still, there must have been some infinitely small amount of luck on his side today, because he heard rifle fire and watched the Drachmans crumble away. Apparently, they had been too bold – Amestrian troops were on the resurgence, now charging and firing at the Drachmans, managing to push them back.

The battle might have been salvageable. Ed didn't care. He was probably going to get trampled, now. Pressing his face in the mud and still clutching his empty socket, he curled up in pain as someone knelt down next to him.

_"Major Elric?"_

Ed looked up at the soldier and cursed his luck again – he was an actual medic, and his uniform was blue. A second later two of them were working together to pull Ed on the stretcher, and he protested, angrily.

"Fuck off! Lemme alone… I'm not hurt… Let me go… Stop… Just… _damn_ it, I can walk… don't--" They ignored his protests and strapped him down. "Hey! Don't do that…! I'm not a fucking _animal,_ stop tying me down – STOP IT!"

A medic at each end of the stretcher, they began the rest of the journey into camp. Each little movement made some new part of Ed's body start to ache. His chest and sides were burning; his nose dribbled blood freely; he was shivering, and the world around him kept on becoming blurry and disjointed, freckled with ugly black splotches. Ed blinked them away and protested again, still trying to struggle against the restraints.

"Hey! I said I can _walk!_ Let me go!"

"We're taking you to the camp hospital, Sir. Just hold on."

"…I'm _fine!_ Get the hell away… damn it, let me _down!_"

The bastards _ignored_ him, just like Roy Mustang always did. Ed trashed against his confines and felt an immediate stabbing pain in his ribs that effectively dissuaded him from struggling any further. Instead, he continued to shout at them, knowing it was worthless. The _bastards_ just weren't listening, even though Ed tried ordering them, tried threatening them, and even tried _begging_ them to let him down.

The camp hospital was really just a large tent, crammed with soldiers in cots and ripe with the smell of blood, alcohol, and rotting flesh. The noxious scent made it almost impossible to breathe, and Ed began struggling again.

"HEY! I can't breathe… I can't… Get me _out_ of here! Quit ignoring me you fucking _assholes!_" He shouted, but his voice came out weak and unconvincing. The medics undid the restraints and eased him into one of the beds, as he kicked and jerked from side to side, aggravating every one of his injuries.

"…Major Elric! You're injured! Quit thrashing around!" Someone commanded, and Ed obeyed – not because he wanted to, but because his sides immediately started to burn again. Choking on the horrible stench and shivering, he collapsed into the bed and let out a thick moan. The world around him continued to sway and his vision shorted out on him a few times. Fragments of voices and words went through his ears, but he barely comprehended them.

"…Broken ribs… Broken hand…"

"…Probably concussed…"

"Needs stitches… here, here… and here… and here…"

"…Automail broken…"

And so on, and so on… Someone lifted a needle and Ed immediately panicked. _Fuck_ no. He didn't care what tortures they had in store for him, he was _not_ going to let them shove a needle in his –- no, damn it, one of the other medics pinned him down, and they stuck the needle in his left arm. It didn't hurt, not compared to all the other aches and pains in his body, but he swore at them and kicked out again. His foot never came into contact with anything. Instead, he grew groggy and numb almost immediately, and his eyelids slid shut almost of their own volition.

_Damn it._

For a while, Ed felt like he was swimming around in the darkness, unable to see or feel anything except the peculiar sensation of floating. He tried to think of Al, but he couldn't remember his brother's face. He tried to think of Mustang, but it only agitated him. He tried to think of Winry, but thinking of her led back to his automail. She was going to kill him when she saw what he'd done with it this time.

He tried to think of Risembool, but instead all he saw was the Elric family home, burning down to the ground as he and Al stood outside and watched. That memory was neither pleasant nor reassuring – it only served to remind him of all the events that had led to him joining the military and coming here, to this hell-hole. Last of all, he tried to think of his mother, but all he saw was that twisted mass of knotted muscles, glistening white bones, misshapen limbs and stringy piles of organs that he had created in her place.

Ed screamed and forced his eyes open.

The medics were gone, and it was dark. He couldn't hear the rifle fire or the shelling, so the battle must have been over. Ed reached towards his pocket watch with one shaking, heavily bandaged hand, grasping it by the chain and wrenching it from his pocket with two unbroken fingers. A glance confirmed it – the battle had started around noon, and it was midnight now. Several hours had slipped by, and Ed had missed out on all of them.

A moment later the pain nearly _crushed_ him. Ed gritted his teeth – it felt like someone was sitting on his chest and smothering him, but even worse than that was the _stench_. The choking scent of rotting flesh and disease filled the air with its heavy thickness, and Ed swore that the odor alone was enough to kill him, if his injuries were not. He scowled, and tried to pull his pillow over his face. He couldn't get it out from under his head.

Nothing was going the way it should have.

Ed lingered for a few moments, eyes closed. He was in pain, but only fleetingly aware of it – it drifted on the edge of his consciousness, unimportant compared to all the other troubles. Now, more than anything, he needed his _brother_. Al...

Would he ever see Al again, or was it going to end here?

Ed choked and let out a low moan, the mere thought filling him with an immediate terror.

"Al! ALPHONSE!"

Here he was again… Crying out to Al, who was too far away to answer, who was safe at home in Risembool. His bones and muscles and limbs and insides burned with a dozen different aches and pains, and he could taste blood in his mouth. The nerves in his shoulder were the worst, painfully separated from the wiring of his automail… And his automail arm? Lying in pieces, somewhere out in the mud. Only his leg was left, now, but the nerves down there were burning and his leg was itching.

The _flesh_ of his left leg itched, even though the leg itself was inside the gate. The itch faded and a sudden, excruciating and _impossible_ pain nearly overwhelmed him.

It had been _years_ since he'd even felt phantom sensation in either of his missing limbs, but this was all part of it -- he was panicking, trapped on the battlefield, he wanted Al, and _everything_ was going wrong. Ed let out a gurgling moan and thrashed, wishing he could escape from his own body. It was turning against him, too.

A moment later, he became aware of what he was doing – screaming for Al again. Ed bit his lower lip in an attempt to silence himself, knowing how futile it was. Al was not going to come. Thankfully, he was far away… Safe in Risembool, _home,_ and while Ed knew that Al was thinking about him, he didn't know that his older brother was lying in a grubby cot and screaming his name. Ed never wanted Al to know about any of this.

_Asking for Al is pointless. He's not going to come, I don't want him here, I don't want him to have to see me like this, or smell all these corpses lying in here with me…_

_...Al wouldn't understand, anyway._

No. Al _would_ understand, but Ed still didn't want him here. He didn't want to see how much Al would change if he were exposed to all of _this_ on a regular basis. It was bad enough watching nameless soldiers suffer, but if his brother was here, going through the same thing…

Ed nearly cried out – partially from pain – and partially from the mere thought. He never, ever, wanted Al to know _this._

Al wasn't coming.

But there was _someone_ else already here who would understand.

"Colonel?" Ed asked the darkness, tentatively, squinting and wondering if the man was anywhere nearby. Normally Mustang was around even when he didn't want to be with the other man, but he didn't see the Colonel now. The more Ed thought about it, the more it confused him. He couldn't have his brother with him, but the Colonel was _supposed_ to be here.

"…Colonel? Mustang…? Where are you? Hey, you bastard… Are you hiding? Am I too _short_ for you to find?"

No response. The more and more Ed thought about it, the more agitated he became. During the entire war, Mustang had been nearby and often within striking distance. Sometimes they were _too_ close – clinging to one another at night in the trenches, as shells continued to rain down and bullets littered the trenches around them, lying in a tangled heap of limbs in their tent – and sometimes they simply chose to ignore one another…

But if there was _one_ constant thing, it was that the Colonel was _always_ around and always _annoyingly_ caring in moments like these.

"…Colonel!" Ed shouted. "Hey!"

Nothing. Ed shifted slightly and drew in his breath with a sharp gasp – the pain in his sides intensified suddenly, before waning again. Gathering about his strength and his wits, he called out.

"Hey, COLONEL! Mustang! Come _here,_ you useless bastard! Colonel!" He could barely understand his own yells – his voice was cracking and hoarse, and he kept on having to spit out blood in order to avoid choking. "…Hey… Colonel..."

Ed paused, and tried a new tactic. "Roy? ROY? ROOOOOOY?"

But the name felt too foreign on his lips. "Colonel?"

_Nothing._ The _bastard,_ he always tricked Ed – somehow giving the impression that he gave a damn, especially when he did stupid things… Curling up with Ed's cloak in their tent and mourning when he'd believed the younger man to be dead, patiently withstanding every insult and abuse that Ed inflicted upon him… Cleaning his automail, covering him in blankets, sleeping next to Ed at night even though he usually ended up getting bludgeoned with flailing automail limbs…

"Well, Colonel, I actually do need you now! Where the fuck are you?" A sudden intuition came to Ed. "You were promoted, right? Is that the problem? BRIGADIER GENERAL! MUSTANG! _COLONEL!_"

His desperate cries went unheard, and Ed fell silent for a moment, biting his lip again and wondering why his continual shouting hadn't attracted the medics.

A second later, the answer occurred to him – there were dozens of other soldiers here, and they were all screaming and crying out, too. Ed's own desperate cries were lost among them, only adding to the feeling of despair and agony that permeated the air. He groaned.

"…Colonel…"

Weakly, Ed began to move into a sitting position. It did occur to him that this was extremely unwise, but he didn't care. He was a waste of a bed that could have gone to someone who was _really_ injured. As he moved upright, his ribs burned and everything else started to ache, but Ed ignored it. There were bandages all over – around his head, around his neck, around his chest, around his abdomen, around his thigh, and even a cast on his left hand. Broken, probably? He didn't care. Ed lightly slid his legs over the side of the cot and put them to the ground, maneuvering his weight around and –

He let out a sharp cry, hitting the ground before his mind could even comprehend that he had fallen. Ed scowled, moving to his knees, and he lurched upwards with aching slowness once more, drawing in his breath every couple seconds. His sides hurt, and it was hard to breathe. Damn Drachmans. _Fucking_ Drachmans. He'd never really hated them before – they were only the enemy because his commanding officers said so – but now, as the pain grew inside, so did resentment. He was glad they had died.

Each step was a struggle. Ed swayed and stumbled, barely managing to make it through a maze of cots and to the tent flap. The fresh air filled his lungs, but the scent of death must have clung to his skin – he could still smell it. He left behind the wounded cries of injured soldiers and tottered through the camp, walking crookedly on his automail left foot and wishing he could tear it off. It weighed him down like a boulder.

When he'd been younger, Ed had bore the weight of automail by telling himself that it was directly proportional to the sins he had committed. How very naïve he had been, back then – right now, with all the pain lacing through him, the weight of his many sins felt like nothing compared to the hunk of battered metal he drug along with him. He would have given just about anything for a leg and an arm made of flesh.

Around him the night was silent, but he was surrounded by carnage. Piles of dead soldiers were strewn everywhere around the camp, amongst the tents and the artillery. Some of the piles weren't entirely dead, either – many were still moaning and suffering away, as overtaxed medics scurried around with stretchers. Most of them passed right by Ed, probably just assuming he was another shell-shocked refuge from the trenches. Close enough. Ed didn't want to spend any more time in the base hospital – instead, he drug his battered, wounded body towards _their_ tent.

It was like home away from home – Mustang and he shared a tent, and it had their bedrolls and a few random personal effects – a pile of letters from Al, a few spare pairs of gloves and some ignition cloth, and a little dresser with spare uniforms. The act of putting up the tent had been a whole war in itself – Mustang had lazily sat and directed Ed, and Ed had struggled with the pegs, cursed, and swore at the other man, who had nothing useful to say except a stream of inane, sarcastic comments. That had been a long time ago.

Logic dictated that the Colonel would be here – purely by circumstance, it was always their meeting place after battles. And if one of them went missing, the other always waited patiently in the tent, knowing it was too dangerous to go back out onto the battlefield and look. Usually Mustang was the one who waited.

Tonight…?

It was Ed's turn.

Ed stumbled the final few yards, and fell right through the tent flap. He struck the ground hard, but after a few seconds of groaning and an attempt to catch his breath, he raised his head and looked around. He expected to see Mustang on his bedroll, lying with Ed's old red cloak again.

Empty. Ed scowled and crawled forth, curling up on top of his own little pile of blankets. No Mustang.

"Colonel, you bastard… You're late…" Ed muttered, absurdly patting around the bedrolls and pulling up the blankets, as if Mustang was hiding underneath one of them.

"…Colonel? Damn it, you're _worthless..."_ Mustang was not in their tent. Ed curled into a pathetic ball and shivered – he didn't like being the one who had to wait.

Mustang would arrive soon. He could already hear what the bastard was going to say –

_You don't take care of yourself, Fullmetal, and I can't always do it for you._

_...Have you gotten shorter, Fullmetal? Did one of the shells blast an inch or two off?_

_Broke your automail again, Fullmetal? Your mechanic is going to kill you one of these days._

Anticipating the bastard's arrival, Ed tried to stay awake for a while, but he was tired and everything _hurt_ so much. Then he resolved to fall asleep – the bastard would come in and wake him up with his coughing, anyway, so now was the time to get in a few good minutes of napping while he could. But once he tried to fall asleep, it became difficult – he was scared of the nightmares he was going to have.

_I'm being childish. Maybe I am still a child._

He tried to think of what comment the Colonel might have about this, but nothing came. Finally, exhaustion did win out – Ed drifted off to sleep, and in his last few moments of consciousness he reassured himself with the knowledge that, upon awakening, Mustang would be back and probably doing something else stupid, like checking Ed's wounds or applying lotion to his little cuts… Hell, Mustang was probably going to drag him right back to the hospital tent. That was where he needed to be. Ed didn't care, as long as Mustang stuck it out with him.

By the time Ed awoke and blearily looked at his pocket-watch, seven hours had passed, and the sun was rising. The camp was silent – no explosions, no rifle-fire.

Mustang still wasn't in the tent with him.


	6. Recurrence

**Part Six: Recurrence **

Somewhere in his mind, Ed knew that happy memories existed – they were just difficult to recall when he was here, lying in a miserably empty tent, freezing, and aching from wounds all over his body. His eyes were focused dazedly on the tent flap, watching small breezes tug the corner open. He could see nothing but gray outside – a foggy, damp morning had closed in around the base camp.

Maybe he couldn't muster up any happy memories, but there was one memory – neither happy, nor sad, but terrifying instead – that Ed was fixated on, replaying the sounds and the sensations - the raw horror - of the moment over and over again.

He doubted Al shared this particular memory with him, even if his brother had been there the entire time. Now that Al was restored, his memories of their early childhood were fuzzy at best, leading Ed to wonder just how successful his soul-bonding had really been. That was beside the point. Al didn't need to remember this particular moment – and for that matter, it had completely slipped Ed's mind until now.

Al had been four, Ed five…

Risembool, caught in the grip of an early, rainy autumn, had experienced a violent thunderstorm the night before. But when the sun rose, the town and surrounding valley laid veiled by a heavy layer of fog that seeped out of the hills and came to rest over the valleys. Ed remembered crawling out from under his bed with Al – his younger brother almost always hid there during thunderstorms, and Ed obligingly joined him – and seeing what looked like a massive cloud just outside their window. Knowing that their mother might have disapproved, the two of them grabbed their jackets and tip-toed outside to explore the shrouded morning.

The fog-covered valley was ghostly – strange shapes and apparitions seemed to loom out at them at every turn, but neither of them had been scared. They'd ran through the mist, laughing and playing a game of tag with one another.

It did seem like a happy memory, but there was something else to it. At some point, Al and Ed had been separated, leaving Ed alone in the mist, confused and just beginning to notice how freezing cold the damp fog around him was. At first, he'd looked around, thinking that Al had found some clever way of hiding and was going to leap out of the thick fog at any minute. But Al hadn't emerged, and Ed could still remember what his own frightened voice had sounded like as he'd called his brother's name – first softly and hesitantly, and then growing louder and louder as an icy terror overwhelmed him.

_And I could hear the river… and I realized…_

A small stream ran through the midst of the farmlands just beyond Risembool, where Ed and Al usually played. It was gentle and shallow during the summer months… But as soon as the autumn rains came, it became deep and strong enough to pull even grown men under the surface. Ed, calling his brother's name in the foggy, shrouded morning, had heard the rushing water in his ears and had been immediately struck with a horrifying image…

_Al… Running around and trying to hide… Totally caught up in the game… He wouldn't even be thinking about how fast the stream gets after it rains…_

Somehow, his mind kept on showing him the image of his brother's face, twisting first in surprise and then in horror right before the vicious current pulled him under the surface. Ed, only five, had imagined all the horrible things that could happen in a morning like this to his happy little brother, who had been laughing just moments before and running in front of Ed -- and was now gone somewhere in the mist, not responding to his calls.

He could still remember the immediate terror and helplessness, so intense that he'd almost _ran away_ – but he'd somehow managed to swallow his panic and _search,_ until, finally, he had found Al. Sure enough, the younger boy had stubbed his toe on a rock and had fallen down in the mist, dangerously near to the banks of the stream. Ed remembered losing his temper out of anger and relief on that day, yelling at Al, asking him why in the _hell_ he hadn't responded when Ed had called. The only answer he received from Al was indignant and tearful, angering Ed even further. He'd grabbed Al by the arm and dragged him back to the house without a word.

_I was only angry at myself…_

It was strange. The memory had nothing to do with alchemy and, in the grand scheme of things, it was only an insignificant part of his childhood – especially considering the events that later happened. But now he could recall it with absolute clarity, as if it had happened yesterday. The sensations – confusion, then discomfort, then utter horror – gripped him, and he forcibly buried his head in his shoddy, worn pillow.

A moment later, Ed almost laughed, thinking how ridiculously paranoid he was being. The memory was meaningless. Al was fine, still safe at home in Risembool. It had been well over a decade since then…

Dozens of foggy mornings had gone by on the battlefield, but for whatever reason, this seemed to be the only one capable of bringing ridiculous, previously half-forgotten memories back. Ed thought of Al, and then he thought of Mustang, and this time he couldn't keep from letting out a choking laugh.

_Why am I even bothering to compare them? Al is my brother… And the Colonel…?_

The Colonel was an idiot.

Ed slowly rose to his knees, shaking slightly and clutching his now empty automail socket almost compulsively. For a moment, he watched breezes tug at the tent flap, scowling and thinking about the older man, wondering how he could feel the same now as he did back when he was five and his brother had been lost in the mist, when Ed was so much older and smarter…

_As if that's true. As if I've really changed at all since then…_

He worked his way back to his feet, swaying unsteadily the entire time. Once there, Ed went to some effort to stifle laughter once more. It was inappropriate to laugh in a situation like this – his commanding officer was missing, he could sense death and suffering all around him, and he was missing a _limb_ – but his mind was empty of everything but a kind of empty horror, and it was _easy_ to laugh.

_And what's funny? This whole situation is funny. I'm lying in here, thinking about something stupid and irrelevant, and outside? The whole world might have disappeared, for all I know…_

Ed tottered forwards and slipped through the tent flap. Just like that morning in Risembool, his surroundings were alien – distant shapes that might have been other tents were eerily twisted and distorted by the flowing fog, and strange, unrecognizable apparitions loomed out of the gloominess around him. For a moment, he almost imagined that he could hear a running stream with a swift current. He scowled, bitterly.

_Why am I thinking about that at a time like this, anyway?_

On that morning, Al _hadn't_ drowned. He'd only fallen and stubbed his toe. Ed had been mad, but no one had been hurt in the end. It was just a silly childhood memory about foolish childhood fears. Al had fallen close to the water, but he was capable of swimming… If he had fallen into the water, he might have been able to pull himself out…

All of Ed's fears had passed. Nothing had happened. Maybe he had sacrificed his brother's body to the gate only a few years after that morning, but that was something entirely different. _Neither_ memories had anything to do with the situation at hand.

_Maybe the feelings are the same…_

Raw, empty horror was one thing that never changed.

_That bastard…_

Ed looked around, seeing a camp caught in a slow downwards spiral. Medics rushed about through the gloom, wounded soldiers moaned in pain, equipment and wreckage was strewn all around, and Ed realized that he had been deceiving himself all night.

_...If Mustang was here, he would have come to the tent. That's the deal we always had._

Ed scowled and started on his way, limping towards the far end of camp. Among the tents, in the hospital beds, the mess hall, the armory… Mustang was not there. Ed didn't even bother looking. Instead, he tiredly dragged his battered frame towards the edge of camp and stepped over the barbed wire at the perimeter, leaving both safety and sanity behind.

He couldn't hear any rifle-fire or shell blasts, but Ed still knew how ridiculous it was to roam out here, between base camp and the rows of trenches that marked the battlefront. Still, he retraced his steps in peace.

Perhaps a sniper would emerge from the enemy trench, sneak across no man's land and take a lucky shot, but something told Ed it was all inconsequential. He was searching for something, and if he didn't find it…

_I may as well take a bullet through the head. I can't last out here without…_

Ed scowled, not wanting to finish the thought. It was giving the bastard too much credit, or maybe he wasn't giving himself enough. Maybe, more simply, he was already insane. The sights around him – corpses strewn across crater-pitted land, unrecognizable and bloated from lying in the cold and wet all night, feasted on by the rats and crows they inevitably attracted – no longer fazed him. That wasn't sanity. But it didn't matter, either.

_It just doesn't make a difference any more. I'm not going to see anything surprising. I probably don't need any sanity out here anyway. _

A more rational part of his mind fumed. _Where the fuck are the medics?_

And an even more rational leftover, just the tiny bit of his mind that was still sane enough to draw logical conclusions, told him that the medics had never had any chance of saving anyone left out here. The last battle had been cataclysmic for Amestris. When the bodies of the dead finally were recovered, they were probably going to burning funeral pyres for days on end.

_There was a time when we used to bury our dead. Now we just burn them. It's funny… If Mustang is out here, He'll end up the same as all the people he's killed with his alchemy…_

Ed let out a choking laugh. The irony was sickeningly funny to him, especially given the current state of his mind. It was the same as the day he had been left lying out in the battlefield. Ed realized he was retracing those steps, too, heading towards almost the exact spot where _he_ had been left to die.

_Where was Mustang then? Did he come out and search for me? No, he waited in the tent. Like he always tells me to do. I did last night, too, but the bastard didn't come._

"Fucking bastard," Ed swore aloud, no longer bothering to keep his thoughts to himself – there was no one living around to hear him, anyway. "…I came back to the tent, and you didn't. What the hell is your problem? Why do you always hold _me_ to higher standards than you do yourself? I thought _I_ was the little kid…"

The morning remained silent around him. Ed passed the twisted remains of a tank – or at least, it had been, until a shell had fallen and ripped it in half. The Drachman tanks could sometimes withstand a shell blast, but the ones built by Amestris could hardly withstand rifle fire. Ed didn't know which one it was, but either way, the tank was finished and its entrails were strewn amongst human remains over a radius of about fifty yards.

_...Bodies all over the place. Some of them might still be alive, but they won't be for long…_

Ed continued to retrace his steps, mostly letting his subconscious do the work. Eventually, he neared another blast area – a crater where a shell had exploded, unrecognizable bodies around the crater, and wreckage surrounding it in a wild circle. Ed briefly checked each dead body. He didn't find anyone living. He didn't recognize anyone, either. It was a step up from before – Ed remembered seeing Al's face on every dead soldier's body towards the beginning of the war, but now he had somehow managed to differentiate the two.

Maybe he had grown numb to the sight, and maybe he had grown stronger, somehow. But the most likely explanation occurred to him after a few moments longer, when he came to another horrifying conclusion.

He couldn't remember his brother's face.

The realization came with a few others – Ed hadn't noticed it before, but he was hyperventilating, while cold sweat ran down his back. He was in a strange state of panic, and probably had been since waking up and finding his tent unusually empty. Ed smiled crookedly.

_How could I have missed that? I'm really slipping…_

Ed stopped near the grisly remains of what of one of the trucks they'd used to ship supplies out to the trenches. Now it was upended, the tires were gone, and the entire side had been blown off. Ed walked around it, slowly; he was surprised to see that one Amestrian soldier remained upright and leaning against the side of the upturned vehicle.

Ed stared at the soldier's jacket for a moment, and then looked at his face for a very long time. Still breathing… Just barely… Still wheezing… Still tired and gaunt looking…

"…You look the same as you did yesterday, but I didn't even recognize you." Ed muttered.

_It_ is _the same. I thought I'd lost Al in the fog, but he was still there… I thought I'd lost this bastard, but he's here…_

But there was a noticeable disparity between Al's stubbed toe and Roy Mustang's legs, which were both littered with shrapnel, and - in the case of the right one - most likely broken in several places.

The Colonel must have gone down in a shell blast, and despite being an officer – and a high-ranking one at that – he had been left behind in all the terror and the panic. Where the _fuck_ was Hawkeye? None of the dead shapes he'd seen had been female, but it was impossible to know for sure.

The medics had clearly overlooked the fact that they'd left one of the most valuable alchemists lying sprawled against an upturned truck, unable to walk and probably half-dead from pneumonia or some other lung disease. But a look around confirmed that the medics were here, too – strewn about in increasingly smaller and more unrecognizable pieces.

_Idiots._

Ed knelt, reaching out with one hand and giving Mustang a slight shake. The other man's features tightened; a fine trail of blood trickled from the side of his mouth, before his bleary dark eyes came open. They were no longer feverishly bright – instead, they seemed dull and listless. Mustang looked up at him for a long while, before frowning slightly.

"…Fullmetal?" Mustang's voice came out weak and cracking.

"…You fucking bastard. So this is where you were?" Ed asked, as soon as the Colonel's eyes fully focused on him. They stared at one another in silence, in a rather vicious competition of wills. Finally, Mustang's flat look became disapproving.

"Your mechanic is going to kill you."

"…Don't change the subject, _bastard._" Ed nearly shouted, stomping his foot on the ground and splashing the other man with mud.

"…Relax, Fullmetal."

"I _am_ relaxed. I am _really_ fucking relaxed right now," Ed said, panting as he slumped down next to Mustang and leaned back against the upturned vehicle. The Colonel closed his eyes again and lingered, shivering slightly, before drawing in his breath and preparing to say something.

Ed didn't want to hear it. Mustang had that _stupidly_ caring look on his face again.

"…Listen, bastard… Do you always have to do things the hard way? You never, ever make it easy for me… I stay up half the night for you, and you don't even show up…" Ed paused. "What the _hell_ are you laughing at?"

Mustang wasn't really laughing, Ed knew, but there was a slight twitch in his lip that he recognized – the beginnings of a smirk. The bastard's smirk was always the last thing that Ed wanted to see – it meant that, once again, Roy _fucking_ Mustang was a step ahead of him.

"…You're being ridiculous…" Mustang said, making a shoddy, tired attempt at explaining it.

"You're being a bastard. But that's not any different from usual, I guess…" Ed admitted, his voice losing some of the strength behind it. "Colonel, why the hell didn't you go off and get sick leave?"

"…Why aren't you gone already?" Mustang asked, his voice low and hoarse. "…You could be halfway to Risembool right now…"

"I'm not going to become a deserter… They'd just hunt me down again. Hell, they'd probably assign _you_ to do it."

"…You're missing an arm. Shouldn't your mechanic be the one to replace it?"

"…Don't _argue_, and stop _fucking_ trying to change the subject," Ed hissed, and even for him, he realized that his temper was wearing unusually thin. Moving around, he faced Mustang, looking into his bleary eyes and wondering just _what_ the older man was thinking. It was impossible to tell. Covered in dirt and blood, his legs nearly in pieces… and yet even now, Mustang was implacable. Difficult to read… and watching Ed with an expression that looked half-sad, half-smug.

Ed looked over the Colonel, assessing his injuries and scowling more darkly with each passing second. It was _never_, ever easy to deal with Roy Mustang. This was just the same as everything else. Getting missions from the man… Dealing with him on a day-to-day basis… Trying to pry information out of him… Just facing him and watching those idiotic smirks spread over his features…

"…How'd this happen, anyway, Colonel?" Ed asked, quietly.

"…I don't really remember… A shell exploded… You and Hawkeye disappeared somewhere in the smoke… And my legs…" He grimaced, slightly, before shaking his head and falling silent.

"Damn it, Colonel, you never tell me anything I need to know," Ed muttered, now studying the scraps of blue fabric and the real _mess_ that the explosion had made of _his_ Colonel. Ed didn't think anything below Mustang's mid-thighs were salvageable, under where bandages had been hastily and incorrectly applied and where most of the impact of the explosion had torn into him. Now Ed remembered; he'd seen Mustang go down with fragments of shrapnel imbedded in his leg, but after that, Ed's own mind had deserted and sent him senselessly running back towards camp.

"…There's something I should tell you, Fullmetal."

"…I have a name, you know."

"I'm sure you do," Mustang retorted, mostly without his usual sarcasm. "A while ago, the higher-ranking officers organized a list of all the soldiers they were going to send home… Your name was on it."

Ed opened his mouth, and closed it, deciding to see where Mustang was heading before interjecting.

"…The reasons were psychological… None of the higher officers thought you were handling this well, and they figured you'd probably lose your mind if you stayed out here any longer…"

Ed stared at Mustang, before hollowly shaking his head. "So… Did they decide I was sane enough to stay?"

"…Not really. I… had your name taken off the list."

Ed clenched his remaining fist so tightly his fingernails nearly drew blood, but even Mustang seemed surprised at how blank he kept his face. Hell… He was becoming an even better Roy Mustang than Roy Mustang himself. The bastard's expression was actually easy to read right now.

"…When was that?" Ed asked, in a forcibly calm voice.

"…About a year ago."

A number of insults came to Ed's mind, followed by a mental stream of vehement cursing, but neither rage nor hate took control of his actions. Instead, Ed let out another choking, sickly laugh.

"…That's… perfect, Colonel… So, is that why _you_ stayed? Even though… Shit, you can barely breathe… You've been sick for weeks… You could have taken sick leave, but you didn't… You were guilty for being a fucking bastard and making me stay… Misery loves company, huh?" Ed asked, his voice oddly flat and deadly calm even to his own ears.

A long time ago, when there had been a desk separating them, Mustang had sometimes abruptly rose from his seat and turned towards the window, making some pretense of watching the goings on in Central, or East City… wherever they were. Ed always recognized those instances as moments when the older man didn't particularly feel like looking Ed in the eye, lest he reveal a little _too_ much about his own feelings. Now the Colonel looked straight at him, his expression completely unveiled.

_The bastard is being honest with me…?_

"…Well, I almost slit your throat. Does that mean we're even?" Ed asked. "…Besides. You were sick, you bastard, and I never said anything."

"You could have gone home to Al."

"…I don't even remember what Al looks like."

"…He's probably changed… It's been a long time."

"He shouldn't have to deal with me… Not the way I am now."

"He's your brother. It won't matter."

"…You fucking idiot, shut up. I probably would have just stayed here anyway. You're a senile old bastard, and you probably would have shriveled up and died if I wasn't around to watch you smirk like a jackass and listen to your stupid short jokes…" Ed snapped, bitterly.

The words that came out were not the ones that he really meant or intended to say. In his head, anyway, there was something less argumentative and more to the point, maybe even _pathetic…_ More pathetic than the Colonel, when he had gone to sleep holding Ed's red jacket and mourning for him, and probably more pathetic than Ed was right now… Shivering from the cold, his automail socket searing in pain, and covered in bruises, but still out here in the foggy morning trying to get a rise out of his _bastard_ of a Colonel.

Still, Mustang looked at him with such a look of terribly sad understanding that Ed almost felt tempted to punch him, just to piss him off and make him look a little more like himself. Mustang was confident, sarcastic and smug, and it almost felt like yet another of Ed's innumerable sins to see him _this_ way. And yet, at the same time?

_He does understand. He understands everything. I don't need to say it…_

Even though the Colonel was injured, just having him around started to draw things back into perspective. Mustang, after all, was alive, one of the only living things that could withstand both this war and Ed's moments of utter insanity. He might not have been Al, but the Colonel still understood.

_I wonder if he called out for me, too… I doubt it. He's not like that. And even if he did, he'd never admit it…_

Ed was the sort who lied in a smelly hospital bed and only called out for Mustang whenever he knew the man wasn't listening; Mustang was the kind who sprawled in a tent and clutched Ed's jacket at night. Ed understood, now.

_Fuck, we are both hopeless, stupid bastards… I think we deserve one another._

Ed, still scowling, reached forth – and his fingers brushed across the Colonel's cheek, wiping some of the dirt away. Mustang lowered his head in shame, although he did not shove away… and for a moment, they lingered, Ed amazed by how feverish the other man's skin was to the touch, and Mustang seemingly torn between moving closer and moving further away. Just like before, the Colonel was real, and alive, and with Ed, the only tie to reality, sanity, and his past.

_Even if we are both insane… We still understand everything about one another now, don't we?_

...The fog was beginning to clear, and above, the sky was a fierce shade of orange – too harsh and frigid to be beautiful, but reassuring all the same. In the light, the Colonel looked even sicklier, and the full extent of his injuries made something cold and painful twist in Ed's stomach. His only consolation was that with the fog gone, he was sure that he wouldn't _lose_ the bastard again.

Tanks were rolling towards them, across no-man's land. The Drachmans were preparing another assault, and this time, it was probably going to be the end. Ed briefly regretted not writing Al with the warning - _get out of the country, the Drachmans will win and they have no mercy_ – but it was too late to worry, now. Ed could hear rifle fire and felt the ground beginning to vibrate… The flimsy Amestrian front-line, set up around the trenches, was going to be trampled, and then the Drachmans would be upon the Amestrian base camp. Amestris was not going to surrender until either the country was destroyed or everyone was dead, and right now, Ed knew the stubbornness and arrogance of Central would hold out even if the troops did not.

They were doomed, he knew. Perhaps reinforcements would arrive, in time, but the war was not going to end.

"…Colonel… C'mon. I'm going to have to drag your stupid ass back to camp," Ed said, trying to keep his voice even. Roy looked down towards his legs, ashamed, but Ed ignored the message that the older man was clearly trying to get across. Instead, he one-handedly pulled Mustang's arm over his shoulders and prepared to stand.

"…Do you think you can support just a little of your weight? I don't think your left leg is injured as badly…" Ed asked, wearily.

"…Maybe… But if I do, I doubt I'll ever be able to walk normally on it again…"

"…Stop trying to make things so hard," Ed replied, flatly, and with what little strength he had left – still more than the Colonel had, anyway – he lurched upwards, dragging the older man with him. Mustang uncaringly allowed his right leg to drag as they moved back towards camp, but he limped heavily on the left, while Ed bore the brunt of both their weight. Behind them, shells were tearing up the ground again. Tanks rolled across the mud. Automatic weapons fired heedlessly and destructively. Above, black smoke swiftly veiled the burning orange sky as the last of the fog dissipated.

Against him, Mustang was trembling slightly even despite his pathetic attempt at remaining calm. He must have been in pain.

"Ed…" He began. "Listen…"

_Huh. So this is what he looks like when he's falling apart,_ Ed thought, a little surprised to hear the shaking in Mustang's voice. _I'm glad he doesn't try to kill me, or something. He just starts using my real name. Which is even scarier, I think._

Ed tightened his grip around the Colonel. "…Shut up. Don't even start."

"…This will never end," Mustang murmured, looking as if he was close to falling into a nightmare even though he was wide awake. "They're coming, but our forces are still strong enough to push them back behind their lines… we'll have to do all of this again… even if they give us a break…"

"…C'mon. We have at least a few months of sick leave between us. I'm missing an arm, in case you didn't notice…" Ed pointed out. "And you've got a whole load of problems… Your lungs... Your legs..."

"…But… even if I can hardly walk… I can still use my alchemy… And as soon as your arm is replaced, you'll be able to use yours again… We'll have to come back here..."

"…Whatever, you bastard." Ed said, tiredly. "…We'll survive together."

_... And next time, it'll be my turn to keep us alive and sane, Colonel._

**End**

THANKS FOR READING!


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